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What is... Visual Culture? Introduction [Martin Irvine, Georgetown] visualculture.com UW-Madison Webster University Rhizome.org What is... Logocentricity? Definition Article: - (1)perceived tendency of Western thought to locate meaning within the logos (written word). (2) A term used by Jacques Derrida to describe the bias of Western philosophy toward a metaphysics of presence, an order of being, meaning, truth, reference, reason, or logic conceived as independent of language.

What is... Allegory? Definition Examples - "A means of making the ‘invisible’ visible" - "When the literal content of a work stands for abstract ideas, suggesting a parallel, deeper, symbolic sense. Symbolism, in ordinary parlance, occurs when an object is used by convention to refer to a general idea, while personification occurs when abstract terms are expressed by human figures, generally with significant attributes. An allegory, however, includes combinations of personifications and/or symbols, which, on the basis of a conventionally agreed relation between concept and representation, refer to an idea outside the work of art." -from Groves Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Allegory of Sight. 1618. Oil on wood. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

Participatory cultures "At MiT5, the most recent in MIT's series of Media in Transition conferences, Dr. Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark theorized that participatory cultures signal the imminent closing of what he called "the Guttenberg parenthesis." According to that theory, we are witnessing a return to the cultural norms that prevailed before the advent of mechanically printed texts. In those oral and folk cultures, practices such as adaptation, appropriation and recombining – what hip-hop calls "sampling" – were not only accepted but lauded. The printing press brought a new regime, in which individual printed works were held to be utterly unique and an author's ownership sacrosanct. But now, according to theorists such as Dr. Pettitt, new digital technologies are spinning the wheel back to its pre-Guttenberg position (closing the parenthesis), and cultural production will be understood once again as a dynamic, collective process rather than the work of a single lonely genius, laboring alone in a garret." from Victoria Loe Hicks: Harry Potter obsession blurs lines between media consumers, producers in July 8, 2007 Dallas Morning News Readings Journal of Visual Culture Cultural Politics: Film & Visual Culture Culture Machine Invisible Culture Ariadne Assorted Interests: American Art American Scientist

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