The Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.

The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time.

The Anthropocene is distinguished as a new period either after or within the Holocene, the current epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago (about 8000 BC) with the end of the last glacial period.

The main factors in deciding this new status is Nuclear testing and Pollution

“In a single lifetime we have grown into a phenomenal global force. We move more sediment and rock annually than all natural processes such as erosion and rivers. We manage three quarters of all land outside the ice sheets. Greenhouse gas levels this high have not been seen for over one million years. Temperatures are increasing. We have made a hole in the ozone layer. We are losing biodiversity. Many of the world’s deltas are sinking due to damming, mining, and other causes. Sea level is rising. Ocean acidification is a real threat. We are altering Earth’s natural cycles. We have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch dominated by humanity.”

The Anthropocene is the most recent in a long culture of defining nature and our relationship to it. It has been said that conceptually nature has always been a product of humankind.

The aesthetics of the sublime revolved around the relationship between human beings and the grand or terrifying aspects of nature.

For Burke the sublime has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty (which is passive). Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear (especially the fear of death) The material cause is equally aspects of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc. Its efficient cause is the tension of our nerves; and are most often invoked through images of nature or natural events in Romantic painting.

This idea of Nature follows Hobbes Leviathan that was published in Britain 1651. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.

How is the Anthropocene Thesis […] abetted or contradicted by different kinds of visualization, and how might artistic-activist practices not only confirm but also provide compelling alternatives to this rhetoric?

World Of Matter– World of Matter is an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part.

Realism is the technical and philosophical basis of Western society. The world exists outside of our concepts of it. Empirical science, for example, is a process of observation of that world. Through the photographic process documentary photography retained an the indexical link to reality through the capturing of light reflected from an actual object in the world. Therefore photography confers authenticity through its supposed transparency. It suggests a factual reflection of reality. However, this use of realism, whether photographic, filmic, digital, theatrical, painted etc is problematic because it infers the factual but in fact is ideologically nuanced.

Bertolt Brecht challenged our naive use of photography as realist medium when he said: ‘The situation [in art and cinema] has become so complicated because the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG reveals almost nothing about these institutions,’

Brecht sought to expose realism (or naturalism in theatre) for what it is, a constructed sense of reality that represents the “prevailing view of those in power”. He attempted to do this through a series of theatrical device in his own work which he called Epic Theatre. The intention being to snap the audience out of their empathy for the characters on stage to experience theatre’s constructs consciously.

“Realistic [to Brecht] means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. These are vast precepts and they can be extended. Moreover we shall allow the artist to employ his fantasy, his originality, his humor, his invention, in following them.

Film Montage- In film, montage was used as a used as a method of constructing a sense of realism that contained inherently a sense of political argument. Sergei Eisenstien’s, 1925 film Battleship Potemkin famously pioneered montage in constructing political empathy.

Brecht used a range of theatrical devices or techniques so that the audience were reminded throughout that they were watching theatre; a presentation of life, ie form of realism – not real life itself.

Narration

Narration is used to remind the audience that what they’re watching is a presentation of a story. Sometimes the narrator will tell us what happens in the story before it has happened. This is a good way of making sure that we don’t become emotionally involved in the action to come as we already know the outcome.

Speaking the stage directions: This device was used by Brecht more frequently in rehearsal than performance. It helps distance the actor from the character they’re playing. It also reminds the audience that they’re watching a play and forces them to study the actions of a character in objective detail.

Being based in Marxist principles this method of representing reality was emancipatory, ie very much opposed to capitalism, imperialism, consumerism, war… Josephine Meckseper’s work on the Iraq War follows this tradition but its effectiveness as a form of critique is questioned by Ranciere.

Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher, 2009 Fisher’s book proposes that forms of visual culture such as advertising and art create a cohesive form of realism that we negotiate as we move through reality: “Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” Fisher, M, 2009, Capitalist Realism, p.16

Realism in the arts is an attempt to represent the world in an objective and truthful way. Realism became prevalent from the mid-1800s in English theatre and French painting, and has reoccurred in various movements such as social realism (kitchen sink drama), documentary film and Italian neo-realism.

Realism is also the technical and philosophical basis of Western society. The world exists outside of our subjective understanding of it. Empirical science, for example, is a process of the observation of that world. ‘Document’ means evidence, and may be traced to ‘documentum’, a medieval term for an official paper – evidence not to be questioned, a truthful account backed by the authority of the law.’ Through the photographic process documentary photography retained an the indexical link to reality through the capturing of light reflected from an actual object in the world (Barthes). Therefore photography confers authenticity through its supposed transparency. It suggests a factual reflection of reality. Documentary photography is ‘coded’ as a form of realist artistic practice. The ‘pure’, objective reflection of reality that is the basis of the idea of the photograph as document is extremely problematic as documentary photography constructs ideas of truth, transparency, evidence, and authorial objectivity – through camera distance, angle, framing, lighting, timing, cropping and editing.

Andre Bazin (1918-1958) – film theorist and critic. Co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. Argued that realism is the most important function of cinema. His call for objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage are linked to his belief that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator.

Bazin argued for films that depicted what he saw as “objective reality”, such as documentaries and Italian neorealist films. Viewed cinema and photography as media that an artist can use to find the deeper meanings behind the phenomena of existence. Advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the “shot-in-depth”, and preferred what he referred to as “true continuity” through mise-en-scène over experiments in editing and visual effects…

The Bicycle Thieves follows the story of a poor father searching post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to save his young family from poverty. The juxtaposition of the main characters, Antonio and his son Bruno, against a setting of empty and crowded streets is what shapes the characters’ psychological and social state of isolation and alienation.

In spite of the least possible interference with physical reality, the world seen through the perspective of the camera lens tells us more about the filmmaker’s subjectivity than the reality he or she tries to address. Rosen’s view on Bazin’s position is that “the ‘objective’ is always infected by the ‘subjective’, never available except through the processes of the latter.” Bazin saw in the Italian neorealists a type of cinema that strangely fused together both mindsets. Their narratives deal with a perceptual drama that exists independent of the characters but at the same time present a conceptual drama that is completely self-enclosed within the characters’ own personalised experiences.

The potential for image control and manipulation provided by digital technology has stirred a great interest in post-production, particularly in the areas of digital compositing and digital editing.

Reality is seen not as something to be captured in the purest way possible by the camera lens but rather as something to be constructed (simulation).

For Prince, the viewer’s interest is no longer in how the film expresses its realism, whether it is highly stylized through the usage of technology or not, but “about the kinds of linkages that connect the represented fictionalized reality of a given film to the visual and social coordinates of our own three-dimensional world. Such focus need not reinstate indexicality as the ground of realism”

On the one hand, “a perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audio visual experience of three- dimensional space” (Prince 1999: 400). In other words, realism is rooted in the object’s primary visual characteristics or visual representation.

On the other hand, a realistic representation “need not reinstate indexicality as the ground for realism… even unreal image can be perceptually realistic”.

From this perspective, digital imagery technology as a theory of film realism brings to the forefront the clear distinction between a realism that is representationally artistic and a realism that is representationally realistic.

Many critics view selfie-taking as an inward-looking and self-centred act, inhibiting the so-called Millennial / Generation Y / Generation Z from engaging with the events they’re physically attending. This view of selfies as the epitome of a shallow, self- absorbed and narcissistic modern mentality has dominated popular debate and public discourse on the issue. Some psychologists have identified the association between self-photography and personality traits such as narcissism.

The naturalised reading of a selfie is ‘look at me’. In the context of the Comic Relief image, Dooley’s selfie with the Ugandan refugee child could thereby be interpreted along the lines of ‘look at me not the child’ or ‘look, it is me who is with the child’. In selfies, the self/subject or subjectivity is the primary representational object in selfies as a visual medium.

A selfie can also be read as ‘look, this is my perspective on this issue’? The essence of our understanding of the selfie resides in this subtle shift of focus from ‘me’ to ‘my perspective’, and underpinning this shift are two assumptions about the selfie: First, from a social semiotic perspective, a selfie contains certain ‘social propositions’ to be negotiated between the image maker and the viewer, and the visual structures of a selfie will provide the textual clues for these propositions.

Secondly, as a visual sign, what is being negotiated in a selfie is not the relationship between the visually represented self and the viewers (i.e. me vs the other) but the different perspectives or points of view on visually represented phenomena (i.e. my perspective on me vs other’s perspective on me). Simply put, the ‘social proposition’ to be negotiated in a selfie is the relations between various perspectives.

Historically, the self-portrait has regularly been at the forefront of cultural identity, influencing how selfhood is conceived within a culture. The development of digital technologies has allowed the selfie to become the most prominent form of self-portrait. Selfies are mainly taken by private individuals, especially young people, and groups visible in news and entertainment media, such as politicians and celebrities.

The development of the selfie is linked to a broad range of (emerging) social practices:

• perpetuating consumerism and facilitating the commodification of different aspects of social lives;
• highlights “discourses about how people ought to represent, document and share their behaviour” (Senft and Baym, 2015);
• seenasreflexiveprocessesofvisualself-authoringandpersonal confession (Hall, 2015);
• capturea‘raw’andauthenticrepresentationoftheselfina fleeting moment.

Selfies have three ‘discursive’ functions (Zhao and Zappavigna, 2018):

• it is a conversational, visual message, where interpretation depends heavily on the ‘triangle’ formed by its sender, the occasion represented and the intended recipient;
• new,moredynamicrelationsofpowerbetweenthe object of looking and the looking subject;
• social semiotic relationship to photographic representation.

Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) – the interactional structure of an image creates an imagined relationship between the visually represented participants and the viewer.

A human face is not present – the gaze is made redundant.

Commodity Fetishism

• Fetish defined as: an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
• Freudianuseofthewordfetishism defines a form of sexual desire is linked to an object. This is not how Marx defined fetishism but Freud’s definition does come into play later!

The exchange of commodities obscures the character of the human relations of production, between people in society i.e. who owns what and who doesn’t, who is paid a lot and who is paid a little, who has access to education and who doesn’t who is the employer and who is the employee, etc.

Commodities become the reified/objectified form of social relations. The commodity embodies the relationship between the workers and the capitalist in his employment of the worker to produce commodities.

Commodity fetishism is when an object (commodity) is revered, aspired to, worshiped as having the magical ability to transform your position within society – your relationship to other people. It embodies social fantasies, promises and illusions. It transcends use value to attain exchange value.

If visual culture is the continuous displacement/appearance of meaning in the field of vision and the visible, how can visual culture reinforce the fetishism of the commodity?

Myth

• Saussure suggested that signifiers (sounds) and signifieds (concepts) are connected toghether by the process of signification
• Barthes suggested that this process does not necessarily end at this point,
• A sign can take part in a new level of signification where it becomes the signified at another level (Myth).

Human relationships are no longer only reified in material form i.e. The goods that we use and buy. Human relations are reified in the form of images that circulate and we use like commodities. These include all images, images of the world, images of Commodities, images of ourselves.

The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away in to representation.

When Debord says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord according to Debord, have supplanted genuine human interaction. His fourth thesis is: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have.” “Consequently, social life moves further (from material reality), leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely the appearance of the image.”

Life is no longer directly lived instead we live through a representation of life as a conceptual identity within the framework of the capitalist system of social relations. This is the Spectacle. It pretends to offer unification but in reality it is only unified in that it has generalized separation creating an almost impenetrable false consciousness of human relations based on commodity fetishism and reification.

This system is what keeps the elites in power making their position unassailable. Like the film ‘the Matrix’ it is so effective because we are blind to its operation. The sum of all of our actions, dreams, ideas, and interactionsis the Spectacle so we cannot easily conceive of alternatives.

IDEOLOGY is – A set of theories for thinking about how belief systems in society work – even if the beliefs are not in the interests of the bulk of that society

IDEOLOGY is – Generally thought of as a set of beliefs imposed on a society by the most powerful people in that society – but assumed as common sense by the majority.

IDEOLOGIES are – Systems of belief in relation to society and culture that cater to the majority – while marginalising smaller or less powerful groups.

How an idea or concept is represented is dependent on the dominant ideologies. Can also be thought of as the value systems of the people who represent these ideologies.

Some examples lie in the simplest everyday metaphors Or ‘figures of speech’ – Involving height and depth…highbrow and lowbrow for instance…

Spatial difference becomes a metaphor for social experience… For example…Top of your game. vs Hit rock bottom. any more? Material, physical, difference is used to make sense of abstract, social,experience.

Another example is the range of metaphors around money and time… Although we are paid for our time (time is money) Time cant really be physically held and collected One person cannot hold more of it than another It cannot be invested to make more of itself

Claude Levi-Strauss – called this the “the logic of the concrete.”  This is the idea that all societies make sense of abstractions which are important to them by embodying them in concrete experience. Making them‘real.’

Roland Barthes defines his own theory of ideology within popular culture and calls it MYTH. Saussure suggested that signifiers (sounds) and signifieds (concepts) are connected toghether by the process of signification. Barthes suggested that this process does not necessarily end at this point. A sign can take part in a new level of signification where it becomes the signified at another level (Myth).

Naturalisation– Connotation produces the illusion of denotation, the illusion of language as transparent and of the signifier and the signified as being identical. Denotation becomes just another connotation.

From such a perspective denotation can be seen as no more of a ‘natural’ meaning than is connotation but rather as a process of naturalization.

Barthes’ Mythologies

• •  Bartheswantstostoptakingthingsforgranted,and concentrate rather on what they mean and how they function as signs.
• •  InmanyrespectswhatBarthesisdoingis interrogating the obvious, taking a closer look at that which gets taken for granted, making explicit what remains implicit.
• •  Weinhabitaworldofsignswhichsupportexisting power structures and which purport to be natural.
• •  Theroleofthemythologist,asBarthesseesit,isto expose these signs as the artificial constructs that they are, to reveal their workings and show that what appears to be natural is, in fact, determined by history.

Vladimir Propp: He was a Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot of Russian folk tales, in order to identify their simplest narrative elements.

He argued that whatever differences there might be in a story you can group together the characters into 8 character roles. He suggests that there are a limited number of character types that share a function. When an audience read a media text it deploys its knowledge of these character types in order to decode the meaning of the text.

The American theorist Joseph Cameron later described a similar system of roles in narrative construction in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949. Cameron’s ideas and book influenced George Lucas very heavily and the Star Wars films can be seen as a practical embodiment of Cameron’s ideas, particularly of the Monomyth or hero’s journey.

Simple five step narrative
1 – A state of equilibrium (all is well)
2 – A disruption of that order by an event
3 – A recognition that disorder has occurred 4 – An attempt to repair the damage of disorder 5 – A return or restoration of new equilibrium.

He said that it is the constant creation of conflict/opposition that propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Oppositions can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic) These are called ‘Binary Oppositions’

We use Binary oppositions to understand the world. To use a common example

The word ‘man’ in English means ‘not animal’, not ‘woman’ and ‘not boy’. This may be extended to suggest that it has further associations ‘not vulnerable’ or ‘not emotional’ . The meaning of the word ‘man’ therefore depends upon the particular understanding of masculinity that is current in the language- user’s culture.

Poverty – What function do the poor perform in society and how is the idea of poverty narrativised in the media as a pervasive form.

Benefits Street was a reality tv series by Channel 4 that documented the lives of several residents of James Turner Street in Birmingham where newspapers claimed that 90% of the residents claimed benefits. It showed benefits claimants committing crimes, and portrayed a situation in which people are dependent on welfare payments and have lack the motivation to seek employment.

In his introductory lecture, Representation and the Media, Hall focuses on the concept of “representation”, one of the key ideas of media and cultural studies. He shows how reality is never experienced directly, but always through the symbolic categories made available by society. He examines gender and racial stereotyping in the media. Stuart Hall

“Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people. It involves the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent objects, people and concepts.

The meaning of signs is constructed by the system of representation. It is constructed and fixed by the code, which sets up the correlation between our conceptual system and our language system. The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the signifier. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable.

Hall states that the media not only represent our cliched notion of people but that conversely stereotypes are often created by the Media.

For Foucault systems of representation (knowledge) are intrinsically linked to systems of power.

Hegemonic = ruling or dominant (meaning) in a political or social context. The image of women in the media is constructed (given meaning) by a patriarchal ideology i.e. a system of representation that is dominantly Male, i.e. White, Middle/Upper Middle Class (rich), Male.

If we think about the relationship between power and the system of representation we can also think about who controls this idea of woman(ness), or any form of representation in the media.

Second Wave Feminists wanted to deconstruct the process of fetishism… that separates the viewer from what they see (as in traditional theatre, movies, illustration, photography)…. but enthrals them into identifying with the images through various seductive practices.

Laura Mulvey’s essay is one of the most influential texts of the last 30 years or so in visual theory. Her theories have been argued for and against, and used in much academic discussion of film, video and still image making.

Women are positioned in this structure, both in the film and in the audience… in such a way that they only exist as objects within the narrative. Actresses are directed to embody male fantasies and objectify/sexualize the female body through gesture.

SCOPOPHILIC GAZE – Active eroticised pleasure in looking at objects on the screen. (separation from object on screen, function of sexual instincts)

NARCISSISTIC GAZE– passive identification with the image seen. (function of the ego libido)