Another evening sitting out in the back yard, this time with our neighbors; the moon yet more full. I'm trying to get my head around next semester's Introduction to Visual Culture syllabus: the new version of Nicholas Mirzoeff's Reader has just arrived in the mail, and its contents make me feel rather too strongly that I am old and grey and that just as I thought I was getting a handle on what's generally understood by Visual Studies, they turn into something else - not just the global (though quite how one teaches that without having a far stronger knowledge of different cultures globally than I do, I don't know), but digital, and the visualization of warfare - contemporary warfare - and violence. Reading ten pages on UNIX programing is not, I think, going to help me understand how the image above might fit into paradigms of representation. It fits far better into the lecture that I'm trying to round off for the Neuchatel conference - arguing that photographers, right through the C19th and beyond, still wanted to claim for their art something of the mystique and the grandeur of romantic representation - not just in their images, but in the language in which they use to describe the technology that creates them.
Have I just written the last sentence, the one that's bee alluding me all day? I'm going to sleep on that happy possibility ...
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