This paper integrates literature from the social sciences and humanities concerning the persuasive impact of visual material, highlighting issues of emotion and identification. Visuals are used not only to illustrate news and feature genres but also in advertising and campaigns that attempt to persuade their target audiences to change attitudes and behaviours. These include health, safety and charity campaigns, that attempt to socially engineer change in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. With the increasing presence of such visuals comes a (...) more emotive media environment with which people are forced to engage, and, under certain circumstances, disengage. (shrink)

Utilizing a pre-experimental pre-test post-test design, this study investigated the effect of an authentic audio-visual American sitcom on the intercultural sensitivity and intercultural effectiveness of a sample of male and female upper-intermediate English students. To this aim, 34 Iranian EFL students were selected through convenient non-random sampling. In order to assure the participants' homogeneity in English proficiency, the selected students were given the Oxford Quick Placement Test prior to the intervention. Over a 10-week period, the participants were presented with (...) nearly 30-min-long episodes of Friends in a flipped context, two episodes every week uploaded to the accompanying website. An online 10-item quiz on the day of watching and a next-day meeting were held. During the online discussion meetings, the participants discussed cultural questions tailored to the aims of the study. The required data were collected through the administration of the intercultural sensitivity scale and intercultural effectiveness scale in pre- and post-test assessments. The analyses of the data indicated that both ICS and ICE improved significantly during the intervention. However, ICS indicated more improvement. In addition, a semi-structured interview was administered to the participants to examine their perception of the flipped classroom experience. Having analyzed the data using MAXQDA 2020, some significant themes emerged which are reported. On the whole, the participants portrayed positive attitudes toward using technology in flipped classes. The educational and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Spatial and temporal scales are essential components of geological sciences; both are almost always imbricated in complex ways, challenging geoscientific knowledge among nonspecialists and students. The present paper focuses on the efforts made by the French naturalist Simon-Suzanne Nérée Boubée (1806–62) regarding popular education on geology. Though Boubée is poorly known nowadays, he experienced some prestige during his lifetime. He worked as an independent teacher, offering private as well as free public courses. Boubée, as a nineteenth-century science popularizer, repeatedly insisted (...) on his disposition for “spreading science for all.” He extensively published books and journals on geology, all aimed at popularizing geological scientific knowledge, considered to be of paramount relevance. This paper analyzes three visual examples extracted from his works: the Tableau Mnémonique des Terrains Primitifs, destiné au géologue voyageur, avec son explication (1831), the Tableau de l’État du Globe à ses différents âges (1832), and the Tableau figuratif de la structure minérale du globe, ou résumé synoptique du Cours de géognosie de M. N. Boubée (1839), supplemented with images from the travel guide Deux Promenades au Mont Doré (1834). Our goal is to understand Boubée’s efforts to synthesize information, scaling down geologic time and space into foldable materials that made geological knowledge cognitively and materially accessible to laypeople. (shrink)

The present contribution offers an overview of the main problems concerning the representation of the planets in the pre-Islamic Iranian world, the origin of their denominations, their astral roles and the reasons behind their demonization in the Zoroastrian and Manichaean frameworks. This is a preliminary attempt to resume the planetary iconography and iconology in western and eastern Iranian sources, involving also external visual data, such as those coming from Dunhuang and the Chinese world. The article offers an intellectual journey (...) into a net of mutual cultural and spiritual relations, focusing on the image of the heaven (and of its celestial beings), thereby proposing a new synthesis and highlighting a number of intercultural contaminations. (shrink)

Visual Arts Practice and Affect brings together a group of artist scholars to explore how visual arts can offer unique insights into the understanding of place, memory and affect. Each contributor highlights the crucial role the creative arts play in envisaging new perspectives on the making of meaning, ones that are grounded in the practicalities, materialities and embodied knowing of artistic practice. Art offers other ways of seeing, thinking, understanding the world. It can be very messy, very challenging, (...) but also moving, exquisite, astounding. The book opens a space for experiential appreciation by offering a writing that allows both the writer and the reader to consider those sorts of embodied sensibilities. (shrink)

The issue of how the studio arts can contribute to a liberal arts education is not something that John Dewey addressed in his long career. This is surprising since he had an enormous impact on educational theory in his early and middle years and an equal influence on aesthetics, particularly with respect to the visual arts, in his later years. Moreover, on a practical level, Dewey and his writings had a notable impact on the role of the studio arts (...) in liberal arts education through his effect on various colleges and universities with which he was associated. Notable in this regard was his impact on those at Black Mountain College who were reshaping our notion of the liberal arts as something that would strongly... (shrink)

The essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to (...) the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture. (shrink)

This special issue on affordances bases on the thesis, that all natural and artificial things inhere affordances that appeal to our cognitive system, and thus invite us to look at them, perceive them, think about them, interpret them, and use them. The concept roots in the studies of the American psychologist James J. Gibson from the 1960s. According to him, "things" offer a certain range of possible activities depending on their form, time patterns, and material qualities, thus becoming part of (...) human-thing-interactions. However, affordances can also be culturally trained. This aspect has been intensively discussed subsequently within different disciplines (e.g., Social Sciences, Design Studies). But only recently has the concept received attention in the field of Visual Culture Studies particularly through archaeological scholarship. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the seeming wealth of visual and material sources concerning stars and numbers that has come down to us from early imperial China (221 BCE–755 CE) and their minimal impact on how we write the history of astronomy and mathematics in this period. My goal is to offer ideas about how we might better engage with these sources and work across ancient and modern disciplines. I begin by outlining the conceptual categories into which our historical (...) subjects divided these sciences, followed by an overview of those visual and material sources we know from textual sources to have once existed versus those that are currently extant. The historiographic disconnect, I argue, is due in part to an inherent disconnect in the sources that have survived and, in some degree, to terminological and categorical confusion between those working in the history of science, divination, and art. Pointing to what are, in my opinion, good examples of how we might move forward and beyond the limits imposed by our sources and disciplinary boundaries, I then end on a list of questions I think fruitful to explore. What, for example, do we mean by “accuracy” when speaking of how constellations are represented in technical literature and tomb murals? (shrink)

In this article I analyse the extent to which there has been a shift in the cultural turn in legal scholarship and specifically from visual to what I call material jurisprudence, that is from visual to material ways of knowing law. I do so through an analysis of Desmond Manderson’s edited collection, Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique, and Katherine Biber’s monograph, In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence. Inspired by the material turn in the (...) arts and humanities I apply a material lens as defined by historians of emotions working within this turn to these books. Using this lens, I analyse the extent to which the authors conceptualise and analyse their primary sources in material terms. In so doing it is my intention to encourage scholars of visual jurisprudence to consider the multisensorial nature of law by considering the material as a constitutive part or instead of the visual as has happened elsewhere in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as to do so with greater specificity and depth. (shrink)

Presented studies investigated the specificity of visual and auditory modalities in attentional processing of emotion, and its association with temperamental dimensions and trait-like attentional control. During preliminary study 30 participants were presented with the paper-pencil visual search task and emotional prosody detection tasks. Results revealed visual happiness superiority and auditory sadness superiority. During the main study, in addition to attentional performance, 51 subjects were administrated two questionnaires: EPQ-R and Attentional Control Scale. Introducing individual differences into analysis limited (...) the general pattern of modality distinctiveness in attentional processing of emotional stimuli obtained in the preliminary study. Findings for all personality traits studied separately showed that Extraversion and low Neuroticism were associated with the visual sadness superiority. Whereas interactional analysis indicated effective visual threat processing in extraverts with good AC and effective friendly prosody detection when Neuroticism and AC remain in inverse relationship. Hence, we have found that processing emotional targets in both modalities is associated with temperament dimensions and their interactions with attentional control. Additionally, findings from both studies suggest that general psychological laws might be challenged by individual differences. (shrink)

Common everyday materials such as textiles, foodstuffs, soil or skin can have complex, mutable and varied appearances. Under typical viewing conditions, most observers can visually recognize materials effortlessly, and determine many of their properties without touching them. Visual material perception raises many fascinating questions for vision researchers, neuroscientists and philosophers, yet has received little attention compared to the perception of color or shape. Here we discuss some of the challenges that material perception raises and argue that further (...) philosophical thought should be directed to how we see materials. (shrink)

This research delves into the potential of implementing artificial intelligence in architecture. It specifically provides a critical assessment of AI-enabled workflows, encompassing creative ideation, representation, materiality, and critical thinking, facilitated by prompt-based generative processes. In this context, the paper provides an examination of the concept of hybrid human–machine intelligence. In an era characterized by pervasive data bias and engineered injustices, the concept of hybrid intelligence emerges as a critical tool, enabling the transcendence of preconceived stereotypes, clichés, and linguistic prejudices. This (...) paper not only explores the applied and generative capacities of AI-enabled workflows but also suggests fundamental approaches that can enhance the creative process and confront the embedded biases and injustices within data-driven systems. (shrink)

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become (...) a site of philosophical analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors. (shrink)

This paper proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The paper thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its target anew: a (...) composition that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the paper presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivist-conceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor. Furthermore, the paper tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media. (shrink)

The authors O'Regan & Noë (O&N) have ignored the case for the visual field as being non-epistemic evidence internal to the brain, having no pictorial similarity to the external input, and being material in ontological status. They are also not aware of the case for the evolutionary advantage of learning as the perceptual refashioning of such non-epistemic sensory evidence via motivated feedback in sensorimotor activity.

Social advertising often employs persuasive imagery in support of a morally laden cause. These visual arguments can take the form of veridical representations of the given situation or the form of purposeful visual blends. Both visual routes to persuasion have serious ethical issues to confront. In what concerns the purportedly veridical images, controversies about picture retouching and framing have cast many doubts on their success in offering unmediated access to a given reality. Editorial interests have proven far (...) too influential on the destiny of what and how is presented to the audience from the amount of visual material available on a topic. Even when the audience is certain that photos are not doctored, the use of veridical images may be seen as unethical. Their disproportionate affective impact may lead the audience to hold biased opinions, since other concerns may be impossible to capture in a vivid picture. Visual blends may be the answer to this problem, employing the fictional or the figurative to help the viewer grasp the moral anatomy of a given situation. Their generous use of figurative meaning may be seen as their strength and their weakness at the same time. It makes them less likely to face accusations of distorting reality, because they do not claim to be windows on reality per se. At the same time, it makes them vulnerable to interpretations that miss their true point – one might appreciate the artistry of a visual metaphor or a visual pun and fail to consider the statement it makes about a given situation. Contemporary philosophical approaches to the place of visuals in moral persuasion inform my analysis of the use of visual arguments in charity-oriented advertising. (shrink)

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.

This study examines the visual representation of diegetic time in visual narrative stories, and explores why the invisible diegetic time flow could be expressed through visible elements, and how patterns and textures could be used to specify states of happenings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical relations between time and space are visually realized in visual narratives, leading to the representation of diegetic time and its related concepts on different levels of two-dimensional space. The segmentation of page space (...) and the visual components within panel space are employed to build a diegetic timeline as well as specify temporal aspects of actions and states in visual narrative stories. Neuroscientific evidence which suggests that a common metric is used to compute magnitudes of time and space in the human brain might help explain why time as an abstract concept could undergo visual materialization in visual narratives. (shrink)

Abstract:Since the birth of autism as a psychiatric category, autistic individuals have been described as preoccupied with the world of objects and detached from the world of subjects, thus marking a distinction between the “social” and the “non-social” still prevalent in autism research and diagnostic criteria. The aim of this article is to question this distinction by examining the role of things in autistic forms of social interaction. Drawing on qualitative data from an ongoing qualitative and phenomenological study on social (...) interaction among youth with autism, I argue that material things enjoy a sustaining and facilitating role in autistic social interaction for two reasons: First, by being sensible things open to tactile, auditory, and visual engagement, and second, by being things that incorporate normative practices. This relation between the material and the social in which the latter is mediated by the former, is beneficial to individuals with autism because it exploits a particular relation to materiality to consolidate a shaky attunement to the social world. I propose a materially mediated mode of interaction guided by the approaches to perception, embodiment, and materiality developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson. This account puts pressure on the phenomenological emphasis on the face-to-face encounter and brings intersubjectivity into view as a many-faceted phenomenon realizable not only through interbodily dynamics but also through the material landscapes situating social encounters. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the visual aspect of metaphors, offering a new theory of metaphor that characterizes its syntactic structure, material composition and visuality as its essence. It will accordingly present the metaphorical creating or transfiguring, as well as conceiving or understanding, of one thing as a different one, as a visual ability. It is a predication by means of producing non-conventional compositions – i.e., by compositional, or even aesthetic, means. This definition is aimed to apply to the various (...) kinds of metaphors: conceptual, linguistic, visual, and material. It will thus challenge the definition of metaphor as a conceptual or linguistic phenomenon in nature that is based on its semantic mechanism, broad concepts, and cognitive value. Those definitions have been prevalent since the second half of 20th century, under the influence of the philosophy of language, and later of cognitive studies. (shrink)

Semantic networks were developed in cognitive science and artificial intelligence studies as graphical knowledge representation and inference tools emulating human thought processes. Formal analysis of the representation and inference capabilities of the networks modeled them as subsets of standard first-order logic (FOL), restricted in the operations allowed in order to ensure the tractability that seemed to characterize human reasoning capabilities. The graphical network representations were modeled as providing a visual language for the logic. Sub-sets of FOL targeted on knowledge (...) representation came to be called description logics, and research on these logics has focused on issues of tractability of subsets with differing representation capabilities, and on the implementation of practical inference systems achieving the best possible performance. Semantic network research has kept pace with these developments, providing visual languages for knowledge entry, editing, and presenting the results of inference, that translate unambiguously to the underlying description logics. This paper discusses the design issues for such semantic network formalisms, and illustrates them through detailed examples of significant generic knowledge structures analyzed in the literature, including determinables, contrast sets, genus/differentiae, taxonomies, faceted taxonomies, cluster concepts, family resemblances, graded concepts, frames, definitions, rules, rules with exceptions, essence and state assertions, opposites and contraries, relevance, and so on. Such examples provide important test material for any visual language formalism for logic. (shrink)

Very little research has attempted to describe normal human variation in female genitalia, and no studies have compared the visual images that women might use in constructing their ideas of average and acceptable genital morphology to see if there are any systematic differences. The objective of the present work was to determine if visual depictions of the vulva differed according to their source so as to alert medical professionals and their patients to how these depictions might capture variation (...) and thus influence perceptions of ‘normality’. A comparative analysis was conducted by measuring (a) published visual materials from human anatomy textbooks in a university library, (b) feminist publications (print and online) depicting vulval morphology and (c) online pornography, focusing on the most visited and freely accessible sites in the UK. Post hoc tests showed that labial protuberance was significantly less (p<0.001, equivalent to approximately 7 mm) in images from online pornography compared to feminist publications. All five measures taken of vulval features were significantly correlated (p<0.001) in the online pornography sample, indicating a less varied range of differences in organ proportions than the other sources where not all measures were correlated. Women and health professionals should be aware that specific sources of imagery may depict different types of genital morphology and may not accurately reflect true variation in the population, and consultations for genital surgeries should include discussion about the actual and perceived range of variation in female genital morphology. (shrink)

This article deals with the nature of the visual representation of knowledge with historical and contemporary examples of the analysis of its defining characteristics as epistemic, heuristic and communicative representation. With this aim along the text we explain the visual material features and their relationship with the elaboration of scientific knowledge. And, finally, we must take into account the status of scientific representation in the complex of contemporary visual culture claiming the urgent need to address this type (...) of particular representation of visuals with greater intensity from its epistemic, heuristic and communicative nature. (shrink)

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.

This intimate account of how ideas get turned into artwork—including dance performance, film, sound installation, sculpture, and painting—looks at how the material thinking that art embodies produces new understandings about individuals, their histories, and the cultures they inhabit. Discussing the philosophy of signs (images, text, and their interaction), the psychology of visual perception, and the overarching notion of mythopoeic place-making, this intellectually wide-ranging and anecdotally narrated primer provides a fresh perspective to the concept of inventing. All active practitioners in (...) the fields of performance, media, film, museum, painting, sculpture, and cultural studies will benefit from this look at how artists participate in the conceptual invention of their world. (shrink)

We examined whether facial expressions of performers influence the emotional connotations of sung materials, and whether attention is implicated in audio-visual integration of affective cues. In Experiment 1, participants judged the emotional valence of audio-visual presentations of sung intervals. Performances were edited such that auditory and visual information conveyed congruent or incongruent affective connotations. In the single-task condition, participants judged the emotional connotation of sung intervals. In the dual-task condition, participants judged the emotional connotation of intervals (...) while performing a secondary task. Judgements were influenced by melodic cues and facial expressions and the effects were undiminished by the secondary task. Experiment 2 involved identical conditions but participants were instructed to base judgements on auditory information alone. Again, facial expressions influenced judgements and the effect was undiminished by the secondary task. The results suggest that visual aspects of music performance are automatically and preattentively registered and integrated with auditory cues. (shrink)

Previous studies have identified the critical role of the left fusiform cortex in visual word form processing, learning, and memory. However, this so-called visual word form area's other functions are not clear. In this study, we used fMRI and the subsequent memory paradigm to examine whether the putative VWFA was involved in the processing and successful memory encoding of faces as well as words. Twenty-two native Chinese speakers were recruited to memorize the visual forms of faces and (...) Chinese words. Episodic memory for the studied material was tested 3. h after the scan with a recognition test. The fusiform face area and the VWFA were functionally defined using separate localizer tasks. We found that, both within and across subjects, stronger activity in the VWFA was associated with better recognition memory of both words and faces. Furthermore, activation in the VWFA did not differ significantly during the encoding of faces and words. Our results revealed the important role of the so-called VWFA in face processing and memory and supported the view that the left mid-fusiform cortex plays a general role in the successful processing and memory of different types of visual objects. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together the writings of some of the leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies to look at the role of perception and the "visual" in our understanding of the contemporary human condition. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to a discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, this collection presents the latest material on the interpretation of the (...) class='Hi'>visual in modern culture. Topics covered include: the hermeneutics of seeing, the visual rhetoric of modernity, the drawings of Bonnard, recent feminist art, practices and perceptions in art and ethics. Divided into three main sections, each beginning with an introductory chapter outlining the main topics under discussion, comprehensive and engaging, Interpreting Visual Culture will be essential reading for students of sociology, cultural studies and art history. (shrink)

The image is the raw material of the twenty-first century. Images infiltrate all social and cultural spaces. Its digital-mediated realities drive communication, industry and knowledge. Images saturate life and adolescent learners are familiar with the participatory nature of image production and its social, educational and personal communicative realities. Vision and visibility, seeing and being now dominate how we inter-subjectively recognise ourselves and perform our world. We also find our aesthetic and embodied self increasingly constituted within imaging acts that are relational. (...) Visual culture may have colonised the self and learning, but imagination is without borders. The current pictorial turn opens possibilities to explore truth in flux through visual artistic acts. This article embeds Deleuzian method, which is one of intuitions, going beyond the actual, or our limited forms of representing life, to recognising that life has future imaginative potential forms and is always becoming. The article discusses an arts-based inquiry project for gifted artist visualiser/learners at an Australian regional university who are given broad topics on science phenomena and asked to give them expression. It suggests that pedagogies of the visual with their performative acts can prise open curriculum where an art-science interchange between two disciplines is made difficult by the current siloed nature of curriculum knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of Anika’s and Joel’s artworks and visual diaries it aims to reveal how their learning events dwell and are performed in aesthetic borderlands and how visual pedagogies forge new fluid visual borderlands and new learning. (shrink)