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This chapter aims to discuss everyday aesthetics related to the growing presence of the digital world in the urban lifestyle and its cultural and political effects. In this regard, the meaning of the term "aesthetics," associated with daily experiences, ethically and aesthetically concerns an individual's perceptions through their senses related to things in their urban environment. Involvement with culture or politics does not form discourse independent of the aesthetics discourse, considering cultural activity and technology as part of aesthetic reality since sensitive aspects encompass the content, and thus, the political issue. The best empirical example to discuss this theme, given cultural and political diversity, is activities through increased digital technologies made possible by cultural projects. One of these projects is the Berlin Cultural Project, which uses augmented reality. Therefore, the discussion focuses on the daily sociocultural relations as a single reality encompassing the physical and virtual world of the "system of objects," "hyperreality," "simulacrum," and "simulation" (Baudrillard 1968, 1972, 1982). Hence, spaces are recognized as political and cultural structures forming the individual in society and having an established and determined acceptance through symbolic images. Finally, this chapter addresses the individual's daily life experience under the effect of the sign value. ; Yearbook of Moving Image Studies, nº 6 Common boundaries between the physical reality and rising digital media technologies are fading. The age of hyper-reality becomes an age of hyper-aesthetics. Immersive media and image technologies – like augmented reality – enable a completely novel form of interaction and corporeal relation to and with the virtual image structures and the different screen technologies. Augmented Images contributes to the wide range of the hyper-aesthetic image discourse to connect the concept of dynamic augmented images with the approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, perceptual ...

Do two people, coming from different cultural backgrounds, see the same image the same way? Do we employ technologies of seeing that embed visuality within relentless cultural and ideological frames? And, if so, when does visual difference become a tool for inclusion and exclusion? When does it become an instrument of war? I argue that we're always implicated in visuality as a form of confirmation bias, and that what we see is shaped by preexisting socio-ideological frames that can only be liberated through an active and critical relationship with the image. The image itself, albeit ubiquitous, is never unimplicated - at once violated and violating; with both its creator and its perceiver self-positioned as its ultimate subject.I follow a trace of the image within the context of a supposed Islam versus the West dichotomy; its construction, instrumentalization, betrayals, and incriminations. This trace sometimes forks into multiple paths, and at times loops unto itself, but eventually moves towards a traversal of a visual divide. I apply the trace as my methodology in the sense suggested by Derrida, but also as a technology for finding my way into and out of an epistemological labyrinth.The Visual Divide comprises five chapters: Chapter One presents some of the major themes of this work while attempting a theoretical account of image perception within philosophical and cross-cultural settings. I use this account to understand and undermine contemporary rhetoric (as in the works of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis) that seems intent on theorizing a supposed cultural and historical dichotomies between Islam and the West.In Chapter Two, I account for slogan chants heard at Tahrir Square during the January 25 Egyptian revolution as tools to discovering a mix of technology, language and revolution that could be characterized as hybrid, plural and present at the center of which lies the human body as subject to public peril. Chapter Three analyzes a state of visual divide where photographic evidence is posited against ethnographic reality as found in postcards of nude and semi-nude Algerian Muslim women in the 19th century. I connect this state to a chain of visual oppositions that place Western superiority as its subject and which continues to our present day with the Abu Ghraib photographs and the Mohammed cartoons, etc. Chapter Four deploys the image of Mohamed al-Durra, a 3rd grader who was shot dead, on video, at a crossroads in Gaza, and the ensuing attempts to reinterpret, recreate, falsify and litigate the meaning of the video images of his death in order to propagate certain political doxa. I relate the violence against the image, by the image, and despite the image, to a state of pure war that is steeped in visuality, and which transforms the act of seeing into an act of targeting.In Chapter Five, I integrate the concept of visuality with that of the human body under peril in order to identify conditions that lead to comparative suffering or a division that views humanity as something other than unitary and of equal value. I connect the figures of der Muselmann, Shylock, Othello, the suicide bomber, and others to subvert a narrative that claims that one's suffering is deeper than another's, or that life could be valued differently depending on the place of your birth, the color of your skin, or the thickness of your accent.Finally, in the Epilogue: Tabbouleh Deterritorialized, I look at the interconnected states of perception and remembering within diasporic contexts. Cultural identity (invoked by an encounter with tabbouleh on a restaurant menu in Orlando) is both questioned and transformed and becomes the subject of perception and negotiation. ; 2011-12-01 ; Ph.D. ; Arts and Humanities, English ; Doctoral ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

Abstract: The article reviews the developing studies of visuality with respect to their own focus on cultural and political fields in which visual communication unfolds. I found that that some of the academic interests related to visuality can be located within the broader
or intersecting field of cultural and political studies and provide successful tools of analysing and describing the communicational interactions within local communities situated in broader contexts of mobility. Some light is shed on the visualisations of the current condition of the nation-state
with respect to globalizing or Europeanising tendencies. Also, I discuss a more general impact of mobility and novel visualisations of the public and cultural sphere.

Biographical note: Stephan Moebius ist Professor für Soziologische Theorie und Ideengeschichte an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz und Vorsitzender der Sektion Kultursoziologie in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie. Bei transcript erschien bisher u.a. »Kultur« (Einsichten. Themen der Soziologie, 2. überarb. Aufl. 2008) und »Das Design der Gesellschaft. Zur Kultursoziologie des Designs« (2012, hg. zus. m. Sophia Prinz).

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures -- Contributors -- Introduction -- 1. Visual Culture and the Meanings of Culture -- 2. Definitions of Art and the Art World -- 3. Concepts of Craft -- 4. Design and Modern Culture -- 5. Fashion: Style, Identity and Meaning -- 6. Photography and Film -- 7. Architecture and Visual Culture -- 8. Representation and the Idea of Realism -- 9. Visual Rhetoric -- 10. The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Author -- 11. The Ideology of the Visual -- 12. Visual Practices in the Age of Industry -- 13. Technical Reproduction and its Significance -- 14. From Mass Media to Cyberculture -- 15. Visual Culture and its Institutions -- Index

The purposes of this paper are threefold: to cover historical, theoretical and methodological overview of visual ethnography (photography and film) as a research tool in studying culture; to examine visual ethnography as a means of cultural representation, and to discuss visual ethnographic method with Clifford Geertz's idea of "thick description". I hope to bring some clarity and consensus to our understanding how visual ethnography can be an adequate research tool for "thick description" and a study of culture. Furthermore, in this paper, I begin by seeing visual ethnography in the context to visual anthropology, photography, ethnographic film, and semiotics.