This article attends to erotic imaginations dreamed within the everyday material realities of queer and trans undocumented migrants in the US. Focusing on fictional representations in narrative cinema, the author analyzes depictions of nonnormative noncitizen life in two independent narrative feature films: Aurora Guerrero's Mosquita y Mari (2012) and Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca (2019). The author argues that, amid feeling out of sync with the normative nation-state's organizations of space and time, quotidian erotic imaginative acts (like daydreaming, reminiscing and fantasizing) allow these films' gender- and sexual-nonconforming illegalized main characters momentary access to otherwise arrangements of time-space and bodies. These different arrangements of spatiotemporality and interbodily relation rebut the placelessness that conditions queer and trans migrant life while opening further possibilities for survival and togetherness across time and space. The article proposes 'edging' as a framework for studying these imaginative rearrangements of time-space and proximity and the cross-ethnic decolonial coalitions they can activate. The author then reads edging's filmic representations through what they call 'edging aesthetics'. In so doing, they suggest these films surface the oft-overlooked significance of ordinary rituals of imagining for staging forms of being-with that exceed the US nation-state's attempts to manage and control intimacies between people.
This article examines how diasporic visual practices mediate the emotional aftermath of Hong Kong's 2019 protests and the ensuing wave of migration to the UK. Focusing on the self-published works of Hong Kong artists Deacon Lui and Kayla Lui, the author explores how zines, comics and experimental photography register not only political rupture but the ambiguous affective states that follow - fear, absurdity, ambivalence, intimacy. Rather than documenting crisis from a distance, these alternative media forms enact the disorientation of diasporic life from within. Deacon's photographic practice centres on disappearance and quiet endurance, while Kayla's comics embrace queer visual excess and emotional instability. Together, their work resists linear narrative and stable identity, holding space for forms of feeling that are still in formation. This analysis positions indie publishing as a method of survival - an affective and aesthetic strategy through which diasporic subjects navigate dislocation, remain connected and make sense of life in transit.
This article is based on Miele Bal's second session after her inaugural lecture at the Coll & egrave;ge de France in 2023. She reflects on the relationship between textual and audio-visual images. She argues that filmmaking has two advantages as a research method, an integration central to this article: an intensity of looking and collaboration: working with, rather than looking at, other people. She reflects on the relationship between textual and audio-visual imaging. She also presents the theoretical, aesthetic and social issues that pertain to the transformations of literary and audio-visual media, and of past into present and vice versa; anachronism as a way of thinking. She considers some functions images can fulfil and the way images are generated not by stories but by reflections inherent in stories and modes of storytelling. At the heart of the article is the performance/performativity dialectic; how performing roles cannot remain without performative effects.
This article examines the adoption of photography in the surveillance efforts of the French colonial state in Vietnam before World War I. Through the colonial state’s historical documents, prison records, and photographs, the author investigates the role played by photography in relation to new ideas of citizenship and racialization, and argues that photography is a medium of colonialism and modernity, insofar as it is not strictly a Western technology but a consequence of cultural contact and negotiations. Specifically, the article examines the institutional practice of photography in three areas: prisons, immigration, and municipal tax system through three case studies of Poulo Condor, Haiphong, and Hanoi. Together, they build an overarching narrative of how photo identification, despite its limitations, became a standard practice in colonial Vietnam and preceded its widespread application in France in the 1940s. In doing so, this article highlights how colonies were historically treated as laboratories for new scientific endeavors. The author does this in order to argue against a linear narrative of progress that treats Europe as an incubator of innovations in the 20th century.
This article proposes that, through synthesizing language acts with visualization processes, generative AI is currently altering the architecture of human cognition, necessitating a new way of understanding our relationship with images. The multifaceted concept of 'image thinking' offered in its title refers to: (1) our human thinking about images - a key area of enquiry for Visual Culture; (2) image generation through cognitive processes, be they human or machinic; and (3) images themselves being agents of thinking. Both Visual Culture and Neuroscience use the notion of 'the mental image', which is premised on the belief that humans form internal pictures in their minds from words and concepts. Those pictures subsequently facilitate how we see - and know - objects and phenomena. Today a novel feedback loop between language, vision and imagery has emerged, with machines being able to generate images from textual prompts. This latest technological development blurs the line between human imagination and algorithmic generation, thus calling for a radical reassessment of how we perceive, imagine and understand the world. Moving beyond the frequent dismissals of synthetic imagery as average, banal or 'mean', the article offers a Vil & eacute;m Flusser-inspired critical approach that seeks cognitive opportunities for us within the current cultural moment.
This article examines the Lebanese-Israeli underground border geography as a site of conflict that is enmeshed in knowledge gaps and paranoia, and across territories and subjects. The author interrogates a series of controversial scientific claims regarding cross-border subterranean water resources in the Upper Jordan River basin and navigates the complexity of researching in such a context with a long history of violence that leaks into the present. In his analysis, the author highlights how knowledge gaps produce a fertile ground where paranoia thrives. Paranoia is here defined as a mode of being in the world that builds connections between seemingly unrelated events and objects. Consequently, the article examines how knowledge gaps and paranoia are materialized across territorial and individual scales, drawing parallels between the affective dimension of border geographies and the research methodology the author develops. This methodology emerges from the specific context of the Lebanese-Israeli border geography where knowledge production is set within a framework of resistive subjectivities.
This themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture is concerned with how to think and work across what might at first sight seem to be incommensurate worlds. The articles assembled here think through questions of evidence, affect and speculation, and how these operate within our current economy of knowledge production through the use of practices such as mapping, modelling, sensing and storytelling. While these practices are not new, they have been transformed through advancements in technology and through the way they are embedded within the digital realm. In attending to these practices, the authors give precedence to different ways of knowing the world, to other forms of intelligence, and demonstrate a commitment to developing forms of practice that weave together what might be contradictory positions into future scenarios.
This article stages a dialogue between the two distant sites of our respective research, located in India and Georgia, both of which are at the centre of major infrastructural transformations. From these two sites of Kutch and west Georgia, the authors have noticed that local vocabularies are testaments to material economies of place and often contain traces of histories and relations that are erased by the global script through which infrastructural developments are justified and narrated. In striving to build a different kind of narration of the transformations that have invested them they place their incommensurability in focus through our exchange. Instead of comparison, this bringing together of two worlds is shaped by acknowledging a shared interest and common concerns. Borrowing from De La Cadena ('Uncommoning nature', 2015), the authors define their effort as a form of 'uncommoning' that shapes possible alliances to resist extractive projects, while allowing for divergence and differences in how the world is viewed (or written).
This article examines the intersection of computational systems and knowledge politics against the backdrop of 'dark epistemology' which is a paradigm in which digital technologies subvert the very terms for figuration and truth. Using Sylvia Wynter's counter-human narrative theory, the author posits that algorithmic media are always mediated, never a raw record, but a site of struggle in which power operates through amplifying uncertainty and derailing hegemonic representation of the 'human'. The argument places emphasis on the way computer systems, as 'metaphors for metaphor' (see Chun, in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, 2013), reassert and disrupt power figurations, facilitating the dissemination of counterfiguration as countering practice. In following the trajectory of a range of examples from satellite imagery to electronic astroturfing, the article locates 'modelling darkly' as practice that takes advantage of epistemic turbulence to create discursive space for absent or disenfranchised views.
In the context of an accelerated demand for resources, this article assembles counter-extractive cartographies from areas of ore extraction which react to loss and questions of urgent heritage, and project (post)mining futures. The cartographies focus on intersectional feminist, Indigenous, and migratory voices, which are often absent at decision-making tables. Lena Sj & ouml;toft's sketch of incisions into the land of the S & aacute;mi, Margit Anttila's embroidered map of changes in her home deeply affected by mining, mapped care activities in an Austrian mining town, and Ina Knobblock's practices of writing-weaving S & aacute;mi feminisms show anticolonial and feminist modes of local struggles. Altering and nuancing knowledges about areas of extractivism, and imagining their futures otherwise, they engage artistic practices and situated literacies. The discussion of their practices is based on eight years of site-specific work undertaken at two different sites of ore extraction in S & aacute;bme/Sweden and Austria, often in collaboration with local practitioners.
This article examines the materialization of the geothermal energy field in the Aegean Region of Turkey and explores the way in which hydrogeothermal sensing and sensemaking was instrumentalized to build the territory of the nation state and those of energy companies. Clusters of geothermal energy plants, local thermal baths and elite thermal hotels serve as sites where layered and recursive forms of appropriation and dispossession enacted can be studied. The conceptualization of local thermal bath culture as a practice generative of social natures and situated hydro-geological knowledge production as a 'society making' science offers insights into the possibility of commoning and sensing in common where, through field encounters, a diversity is assembled around hydro-geothermal matters of concern. Guided by fieldwork and testimonies, this conceptual reworking reveals sites where reappropriation may begin within a territory shaped by enclosures and marked by friction between parties engaged in different forms of hydrogeothermal sensing.
