Imagery in the 21st Century
by Oliver Grau, Editor; with Thomas VeiglAs I began this review I began to think that the refrain “we are surrounded by images today” has lost its impact (despite my being among the guilty users of it). On the one hand, it seems that many of us notice the imagery.

Yet, on the other hand, as we increasingly engage with our visual culture certain norms for our critical investigations are also developing. I’m not sure where this leaves us. To be sure, the nature and complexity of our image-abundant culture is extraordinary. Images are no longer sparse and highly treasured. Rather, we have visual social media, scientific imaging tools, and even static objects like paintings populate the ever-changing screens of our mobile and desktop devices. Even those among us who have resisted some of the broad spectrum of electronic options (think Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, thousands of television channels, digital games, and virtual worlds) cannot escape this new world.

Overall, the book offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on expanding and novel forms of images and visualization.  Drawing on a number of experts, the twenty chapters highlight new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems. In today’s information explosion the question of where what digital images represent and where they fit in the scheme of things becomes quite prismatic.  As a whole, the chapters are quite strong; they do not suffer from the unevenness so common in collections of conference papers, which this book is.  Of particular value is the breadth of the essays.  Researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities explore the wealth of diverse functionality that images have evolved to offer to our lives, that includes lab applications, social commentary, humanistic questions, and experimental art projects.  The spectrum of topics include: database economy (Sean Cubitt), telepresent images (Martin Schulz), ethical boundaries (Eduardo Kac), the emergence of a future web-based video aesthetic (Thomas Veigl), brain research (Olaf Breidbach), medical illustration (Dolores and David Steinman), interdisciplinary practices (James Elkins), the role of source code (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun), the interface (Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau), the museum (Peter Weibel), cellular automata (Tim Otto Roth and Andreas Deutsch ), cultural analytics (Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass) and a digital version of the Warburg Image Atlas (Martin Warnke).  Even this abbreviated list offers a glimpse into the diversity of efforts to expand visual competence through providing cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences. While this range makes the volume a valuable tool for examining this subject across disciplines, the title, Imagery in the 21st Century, is likely to seem a rash overstatement in a few decades, given that the century has hardly begun.

Chapters focusing on applications and innovations offer the most of substantive value, in my view. “Toward New Conventions for Visualizing blood Flow in the Era of Fascination with Visibility and Imagery” by Dolores Steinman and David Steinman falls into this category. Well written and comprehensive, these authors set the stage by pointing out that medical images (drawings, woodcuts, engravings) have always played a key role in educating practitioners and knowledge development. They then follow with case studies that illustrate their efforts to represent blood flow in the context of the living body and conclude with some commentary on medical imagery as art and in popular culture.

James Elkins’ chapter, “Visual Practices across the University: A Report,” also stood out. Elkins presents a brief summary of a book called Visual Practices across the Universitythat was published in German in 2007 and is little known outside of the German-speaking world. The essay summarizes an exhibition project that was initiated by sending email to faculty in the sixty-odd departments at University College, Cork asking for exhibition proposals from anyone who uses images in their work.  What stood out in his commentary is how differently scientists, humanists and artists think about images and imagery. In this case, he found that while most visual work in the university is done outside of the humanities, most of this work is invisible because the routine image making and image interpretation is not considered as important to the goals as what the images represent and the science that they make possible.

Oliver Grau, the editor, is a Professor for Image Science and Dean of the Department for Cultural Studies at Danube University, the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003) [1] and the editor of MediaArtHistories. His collaborator, Thomas Veigl, is on the scientific staff of the Department for Image Science at the Danube–University Krems.  Their opening chapter, Introduction: Imagery in the 21^st Century, sets the stage well and is available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262015722chap1.pdf . Grau’s concluding section on “Media Art’s Challenge in Our Societies” offers an overview of image studies today.  Parts of the chapter are useful but, because some sections in it are so focused on his professional efforts to meet today’s challenges rather than the challenges overall, the text read like an infomercial at times.

Throughout the book it is clear that there are the endless options for image manipulation and that while new media presents us with both interactive opportunities it also raises challenging questions (about human autonomy, entertainment, interaction, etc.).  The editors note:

“Images increasingly define our world and our everyday life: in advertising, entertainment, politics, and even in science, images are pushing themselves in front of language. The mass media, in particular, engulf our senses on a daily basis. It would appear that images have won the contest with words: Will the image have the last word?” (p. 6)

Perhaps images will have the last word.  On March 12^th of this year (2012) theEncyclopaedia Britannica announced “it will cease publication of the 32-volume printed edition of its flagship encyclopedia, continuing with the digital versions that have become popular with knowledge seekers in recent decades.”  The press release also noted that “[The Encyclopedia Britannica] was originally published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768 and has been in print continuously ever since [2]. When I grew up, like many of my generation, this book was like browsing the web.  I used to love to turn the pages, looking at the images and reading the articles that related to images that caught my fancy.

Of course, the Grau book itself raises another side of the question about whether images will have the last word. At this point in time it is not available electronically although sections of the text (without the images!) are on Google Books; moreover Google Books does not offer active links to all the many, many websites the Grau book references. Amazon’s page for the book does not link to a Kindle version.  Instead, Amazon has a link asking visitors to tell the publisher to offer a Kindle version.

So, will images have the last word? Perhaps. Or perhaps we need to ask: Is it a good thing for images to have the last word?  I did not think that the depth of this kind of question was fully addressed in the book since its focus was on the importance of understanding images as vital and dynamic parts of our world today. Thus, my primary concern about this volume, which I recommend overall, is that the reflections and analytical approaches offered did not seem to balance the euphony and cacophony of our experience today. While I’m not exactly sure how this relates to whether images will have the last word, I do know that at times all of the changing images surrounding me feel very cacophonic.  As a participant in the movement is to reverse the dominance of textual sources in our approaches to knowledge, as we celebrate our visual abundance, visualization methods, the distribution of images, and how imagery benefits our lives; it seems foreign to have evolved to the point that I think so much about the visual noise.  Even in this book I found that some of the projects seemed strikingly cacophonic, and thought that the theoretical assumptions of the authors overall are more biased toward euphonic reactions to our visual culture than the harshness and discordant qualities that are congruent with our visual culture?

Perhaps the next step is making sure we address that the cacophonic side is actively included in our critical analyses or imagery.  Grau does stress that using an historical lens is an aid in understanding our imagery today. This perspective opens the door for a balanced analysis of the visual and textual and I support him in this effort. Therefore, while the book is only a slice of the imagery picture today, I think readers will gain much from spending time with Imagery in the 21st Century.

References:
[1] See my Leonardo Review at http://leonardo.info/reviews/feb2003/GRAU_ione.html.

[2] “Encyclopaedia Britannica To End Print Edition, Go Completely Digital,” http://www.corporate.eb.com/?p=508.

These works were presented at the Leonardo Days at the Network Science conferences, the High Throughput Humanities conference, and in the Leonardo journal.

The publication is a project of the ATEPUCU: The ATEC Experimental Publishing and Curating initiative at UT Dallas. A web companion is available at http://www.AHCNcompanion.info.

Contents:

Preface by Roger Malina
Introduction by Isabel Meirelles and Maximilian Schich

I Networks in Culture

Networks of Photos, Landmarks, and People
David Crandall and Noah Snavely

GAP: A NeoGeo Approach to Classical Resources
Leif Isaksen et al.

Complex Networks in Archaeology: Urban Connectivity in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain
Tom Brughmans, Simon Keay, and Graeme Earl

II Networks in Art

Sustaining a Global Community: Art and Religion in the Network of Baroque Hispanic-American Paintings
Juan Luis Suárez, Fernando Sancho, and Javier de la Rosa

Artfacts.Net
Marek Claassen

When the Rich Don’t Get Richer: Equalizing Tendencies of Creative Networks
John Bell and Jon Ippolito

The Mnemosyne Atlas and The Meaning of Panel 79 in Aby Warburg’s Oeuvre as a Distributed Object
Sara Angel

Documenting Artistic Networks: Anna Oppermann’s Ensembles Are Complex Networks!
Martin Warnke and Carmen Wedemeyer

Net-Working with Maciunas
Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt

Network Science: A New Method for Investigating the Complexity of Musical Experiences in the Brain
Robin W. Wilkins et al.

Networks of Contemporary Popular Musicians
Juyong Park

III Networks in the Humanities

The Making of Sixty-Nine Days of Close Encounters at the Science Gallery
Wouter Van den Broeck et al.

Social, Sexual and Economic Networks of Prostitution
Petter Holme

06.213: Attacks with Knives and Sharp Instruments: Quantitative Coding and the Witness To Atrocity
Ben Miller

The Social Network of Dante’s Inferno
Amedeo Cappelli et al.

A World Map of Knowledge in the Making: Wikipedia’s Inter-Language Linkage as a Dependency Explorer of Global Knowledge Accumulation
Thomas Petzold et al.

Evolution of Romance Language in Written Communication: Network Analysis of Late Latin and Early Romance Corpora
Alexander Mehler et al.

Need to Categorize: A Comparative Look at the Categories Of Universal Decimal Classification System and Wikipedia
Almila Akdag Salah et al.

The Development of the Journal Environment of Leonardo
Alkim Almila Akdag Salah and Loet Leydesdorff

IV Art about Networks

Tell Them Anything but the Truth: They Will Find Their Own. How We Visualized the Map of the Future with Respect to the Audience of Our Story
Michele Graffieti et al.

Model Ideas: From Stem Cell Simulation to Floating Art Work
Jane Prophet

Culture, Data and Algorithmic Organization
George Legrady

Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0
Anna Dumitriu

Narcotic of the Narrative
Ward Shelley

V Research in Network Visualization

Building Network Visualization Tools to Facilitate Metacognition Incomplex Analysis
Barbara Mirel

Pursuing the Work of Jacques Bertin
Nathalie Henry Riche

More information: Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks

	Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law by Kembrew McLeod & Rudolf Kuenzli, Editors Reviewed by Rob Harle
	Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976-1979 by Destroy All Monsters Reviewed by Mike Mosher
	A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities -Neuroscience Divide by Barbara Maria Stafford, Editor Reviewed by Rob Harle
	Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution by George Gessert Reviewed by Craig Hilton
	Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing by Ann Cooper Albright Reviewed by Giovanna L. Costantini
	Remixthebook by Mark Amerika Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Transmission Arts: Artists & Airwaves
by Galen Joseph-Hunter, Penny Duff, and Maria Papadomanolaki, Editors
Reviewed by John F. Barber

Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings
by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Editors
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Bach Jazz: Güher and Süher Pekinel Featuring the Jacques Loussier Trio by Barrie Gavin, Hanno Rinke, et al., Directors
Reviewed by Richard Kade

The resource can be accessed at http://www.zotero.org/groups/magic_lantern_research_group. Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox since ZOTERO fluently works together with this browser.

How to become a member, contact Kentwood Wells @ kentwood.wells@uconn.edu
I added a QR e-mail code for direct download of Kentwood’s address onto your smartphone or tablet.

Please visithttp://www.thelab.org/schedule/events/560-science-fair.html for full details, registration form, and more info.

The Milemete Treatise and Companion Secretum Secretorum: Iconography, Audience, and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century England
by Libby Karlinger Escobedo
Reviewed by Rob Harle

The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age
by David M. Berry
Reviewed by Jussi Parikka

Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin
by Riccardo Manzotti
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
by Nicolas de Monchaux
Reviewed by Valérie Lamontagne

Materials Received Plymouth September 2011Compiled by Martyn Woodward

Arnheim for Film and Media Studies
by Scott Higgins, Editor
Reviewed by Ian Verstegen

ArtScience: A Journey Through Creativity – permanent exhibition and Travelling the Silk Road exhibition
Reviewed by Stella Veciana

Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work
by Nigel Cross
Reviewed by Dene Grigar

East Bay Open Studios Preview Exhibition and East Bay Open Studios 2011
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Fastwürms Donky@Ninja@Witch: A Living Retrospective
by Philip Monk
Reviewed by Rob Harle

The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing
by Didier Maleuvre
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Think Art – Act Science (Pensar art – Actuar ciència): Swiss artists-in-labs
by Irène Hediger, Curator

and

Visceral: The Living Art Experiment
by Orton Catts and Ionat Zurr, Curators
both reviewed by Harriet Hawkins, Deborah Dixon and Elizabeth Straughan

New materials received – July 2011 Compiled by Martyn Woodward

A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City
by Despina Stratigakos
Reviewed by Zainub Verjee

Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe
by Nikos Kotsopoulos, Editor
Reviewed by Florence Martellini

Grafik Dynamo
by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett, with essay by Joseph Tabbi
Reviewed by Dene Grigar

Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema
by David A. Kirby
and
From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age
by Andrew Utterson
Reviewed by Mike Leggett

Le Sel de la Semaine: Henry Miller
by Fernand Seguin
and
Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture
by Christine L. Marran
and
The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins. History and Impact of Patriarchy
by Cristina Biaggi, Editor
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions
by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Editor
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Theories of International Politics and Zombies
by Daniel W. Drezner
Reviewed by Anna B.Creagh

Water, Place, & Equity
by John M. Whiteley, Helen Ingram & Richard Warren Perry, Editors
Reviewed by Zainub Verjee

Zones of Re-membering: Time, Memory, and (un)Consciousness
by Don Gifford; D. E. Morse, Editor
Reviewed by Rob Harle

Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons
by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Soren Pold, Editors
Reviewed by Ellen Pearlman

The Filming of Modern Life. European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s
by Malcolm Turvey
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

In Praise of Copying
by Marcus Boon
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Lumo: One Woman’s Struggle to Heal in a Nation Beset by War
by Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Nelson Walker III
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Paris 1919: Inside The Peace Talks That Changed The World
by Paul Cowan
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Octopus Time: Bellmer Painting
by Herbert Lust
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art
by Alison Syme
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

U-n-f-o-l-d: A Cultural Response to Climate Change
Museum of Contemporary Photography and Glass Curtain Gallery
Reviewed by Elizabeth Straughan, Deborah Dixon and Harriet Hawkins

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk, Editors
Reviewed by Enzo Ferrara

New Materials Received – May 2011
Compiled by Martyn Woodward