Present Tense Bisexuality

A review of Steven Angelides's A History of Bisexuality (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001)

The Aesthetic Revival

A review of Bether Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maison, Jaleh Mansoor and Seth McCormick (eds), Communities of Self: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke, 2009

Center, periphery: theory

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Historicising contemporary bisexuality

© 2009 Haworth Press, Binghamton, NY. "Historicising contemporary bisexuality", Journal of Bisexuality, 9(1), 3-15. Copies of the article are available from the Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. [email protected]. http://www.haworthpress.com/Contemporary bisexuality has a distinctively modern history that begins in the middle of the nineteenth century and develops through a matrix of three interconnected definitions, as combinations of biological, psychical and sexual categories - male/female, masculine/feminine and heterosexual/homosexual. Due in part to bisexuality's marginality in theories of sexuality, recent theorisations of bisexuality have often been reluctant to historicise the category of bisexuality itself. However, bisexuality's origins in the nineteenth century, particularly its relation to Darwinism and theories of evolution, continue to shape how it is articulated in the early twenty-first century

Instafame

"Instafame charts the impact of Instagram – one of the world's most popular social media platforms – on visual culture in the decade following its launch. MacDowall traces the intuitive connections between graffiti, street art and Instagram, arguing that social media's unending battle for a viewer's attention is closely aligned with the eye-catching ethos of unsanctioned public art." -- Publisher's website

Graffitimedia: How graffiti functions as a model for new media futures

As emergent forms of design and technology are mobilised for both the archiving of graffiti and graffiti prevention, new media forms are also appropriating graffiti as a model for digital aesthetics and the democratic spatial practices of the contemporary consumer. This paper examines the popularity of graffiti as a model for new media production and the ways in which this interest rewrites the history of graffiti as a form of popular media.From text recognition in Palm-Pilots to the digital tagging of mobile locative media, the generic practice of graffiti has provided a compelling model for both the aesthetics and function of new technology. “Playground ZEDZbeton 3.0” an outdoor projection by Maurer United Architects projects graffiti images that “emanat[e] architectural power,” producing urban space “as a variable, treacherous terrain.” In John Geraci’s Grafedia interactive media project, graffiti functions as a model for the democratic use of public spaces usually controlled by “companies with big advertising budgets.” It is the qualities compatible with the late capitalist urban subject that are most evident in new media’s appropriation of graffiti: an individualistic, self-promoting, highly-mobile and spatially engaged consumer, literate in popular culture and the transformation of archaic written forms into contemporary visual ones. Graffiti’s appearance in the branding of new media also makes evident graffiti’s own status as a form of popular media whose global proliferation has been underwritten by the circulation of films, magazines and more recently, the Internet and digital technology. At the same time however, government and law enforcement organisations have adopted new technology to restrict graffiti production: intelligent security cameras, international information databases, electronic matching of graffiti tags and collation of GIS statistics on graffiti have been among the anti-graffiti measures involving new media techSeptember 7-9, 200

Spatio-temporal mapping of street art using Instagram

By scraping metadata from Instagram images tagged with #MelbourneStreetArt, we are able to create geographical and temporal maps of street art in Melbourne, mediated through the collective eye of Instagram. Apart from merely identifying the most popular images, geo-tagged metadata allows us to create spatial heat maps to identify physical locations of high-image production. Caption data beneath the images allows us to search for high frequency words, which we use to identify patterns within the online audience’s relationship to street art. Finally by simply plotting out the number of images produced each day and cross-referencing with the corresponding caption data, we are able to identify historically significant events within Melbourne’s street art culture. The analysis is easy to use, even for a researcher with minimal programming experience and can be used to project cultural trends (beneath any hashtag) or as a tool to navigate historical Big Data within a conservation context

Audience constructed genre with Instagram: Street art and graffiti

This paper provides an accessible methodology for mapping audience-constructed genres using the online image-sharing platform Instagram. We apply the method to classify artists who utilize public space in relation to the categories ‘street art’ and ‘graffiti bombing’ based on correlations between an artist’s Instagram follower audience and general ‘street art’ and ‘graffiti bombing’ accounts. By measuring the artist’s audience at different times, we can map not only their specific audience composition but also project their demographic trajectory. Finally we provide a methodology to estimate the total online audience for a specific genre: how many total Instagram accounts might follow street art content? This methodology can function as a powerful analytical tool, but is also easy to use, even for a researcher with limited mathematical or programming experience