Visual Communication

Electronic artist Pipilotti Rist’s colorful and sensuous video installations enliven the new media landscape and offer a fresh paradigm for conceptualizing color in electronic media art. This article traverses this landscape in Rist’s work by way of Gilles Deleuze’s equally unique and idiosyncratic color theory. While Deleuze articulated his color theory in terms specific to painting, his theory was nonetheless structured out of analogies to inorganic, electronic, and synthetic, machine systems, and thus it is highly compatible for discussions of color in electronic aesthetics. This article explicates Deleuze’s argument that color is a form of haptic sensation that is not nostalgic, nor purely meaningless, but rather offers fresh affects, erotics, and sensorial possibilities that balance meaning and chaos, and affect and logic. The article concludes that the much-needed continuation of color philosophy within new media art is broached through Rist’s synthetic, yet lively artwork.

This article examines the praxis of prominent photographers who were professionally active during the 1980s in South Africa, based on 26 personal interviews. The authors look at issues concerning practitioner autonomy, or the photographer’s freedom to make independent communication-related choices while working within social documentary or photojournalism genres. The data suggest that the majority of photographers operated on the level of strategic social actions with low levels of practitioner autonomy, using photography in the first instance as a ‘weapon’ in the fight against apartheid, actively forming collectives to assist with the distribution of resistance images internationally. In contrast, those photographers who opted to operate primarily as independent social commentators remained in the minority.

Digital storytelling (DST) is being increasingly used in a range of contexts to exploit current technological capabilities of capturing and reproducing community stories. Methods of storytelling collection are typically realized over short time frames of days or weeks, and appropriate visual images and interview data produce multimodal outputs. A particular stream of work has developed in community-based DST around intergenerational storytelling in environments where student researchers may work with older storytellers in culturally diverse urban settings. DST also emphasizes the participatory nature of the process and outcomes with respect to enabling untold but significant stories to emerge, and technical and storytelling skills to be transferred to participants through the process. This article addresses the particular concerns of relationship building and the pedagogical aims of training students to carry out research using this participatory DST research approach where intergenerational and cultural issues are foregrounded. In the conclusion, the author reflects on this particular focus and the shortcomings of the project with regard to the substantive participatory and democratic benefits exemplified by other projects; he also provides evidence of the other achievements of this project in an intergenerational project supported by an inner-city health organization in Melbourne, Australia.

The term ‘texture’ is often applied beyond the tactile, to describe visual and aural qualities. While tactile, visual and aural texture have been studied separately in various fields, the relationships between them remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this article proposes parameters for describing tactile surface texture and visual texture, and compares their meaning-making potential. The authors argue that, as new technologies increasingly limit the role of tactile experience and expand the importance of the visual, there is a growing need to study the influence of ubiquitous technologies on our use and understanding of the semiotic potential of resources such as texture. They hypothesize about this influence by reviewing the presentation of texture as a fill option for shapes and backgrounds in Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows from 1992 to 2007.

By analysing multimodal TV advertisements, this study aims to show how intertextual voices are exploited in advertising discourse to enhance persuasive power. Taking as their point of departure the assumption that all discourses are intertextual recontextualizations of social practice that draw on external voices from both specific discourses and discursive conventions, the authors identify two types of intertextual voice in TV advertisements: character and discursive voice. This article illustrates the multimodal construction of voices and demonstrates that the choice of voices is closely related to the ‘domain’ of the product. It is argued that the intertexual voices contribute to the advertising discourse through multimodal engagement strategies. Character voice endorses the advertised product through such resources as lexico-grammar, intonation, facial expression and staged narrative, while discursive voice endorses the advertised product through contextualization and intertextual discourse structure. It is hoped that the study will shed light on the understanding of the heteroglossic nature of advertisements, the interaction between intertextual voices and the advertised message, and multimodal construction of voices and engagement.