Ambient Images

The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blasé attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a “blizzard of photographs.” In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-to-face encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram cliché, with “sourdough” becoming Google’s top food-related search phrase in 2020. The zoom boom soon became a new malaise—zoom fatigue. This adoption of virtual platforms was a profound incursion. It altered our sense of time and space as sense-making and social performance were increasingly aimed at and organised via camera and screen. Linear biographical narratives were cross-cut and spliced in novel ways. The image was less and less a document of an external reality, but more and more part of the new forms of mediated sociality. The diminution of physical engagements had an impact on how impressions were formed, what constituted the sensory triggers for memory, as well as shifting the markers for processes of understanding and decision-making. In this environment, images do not just multiply. Their increasing number also accentuates how they are stitched together to form new atmospheres, assemblages, iterations—or what we call the production of ambient images

Museums as assemblage: practice and potentiality

© 2019 Jasmin PfefferkornIn this dissertation, I explore the emergence of the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). In contrast to the voluminous media reports on its ground-breaking and radical entry into the museum world, I set out to situate this museum within a wider historical and theoretical framework. I introduce the key concept of assemblage systems theory to illustrate contemporary museum practice through a philosophy of openness, rather than fixed-chronological or fixed-institutional approaches. A key aim of this body of work is to provide a new critical framework for understanding contemporary museum practice, using assemblage systems theory, before applying this method to a case study of Mona. This thesis is divided into three sections. Section one (chapters one to three) serves to map out the field and provide a method of reframing. Chapter one maps a genealogy of museums, while chapter two explores key threads of institutional critique. These provide a contextual grounding for my argument that current museum practice is best understood through multiple, non-linear narratives. In the third chapter, I develop my methodological approach and conceptual framework, drawing on Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) extension of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1986) concept of ‘assemblage’, Conal McCarthy’s (2015) outline of ‘museum practice’ and Duncan Grewcock’s (2014) ‘critical reflexive visitation’. I argue that by tracing the interactions occurring between components of a variety of museums understood as ‘assemblages’, we can identify four ‘common notions’, the ‘normative’, ‘responsive’, ‘affective’ and ‘emergent’. In section two (chapters four to seven), I explore each of these common notions in turn, illustrating their processes of territorialisation and de/reterritorialisation. Section three (chapters eight and nine) serves as my primary case study and concluding reflection. In chapter eight, I undertake a sustained engagement with Mona to crosscheck its practices against the assemblage systems theory framework outlined in the preceding chapters. I argue that the interactions at Mona are constituted by an elaborate and dynamic interplay with a larger cultural framework and visitor agencies, problematising the idea that Mona fits within a linear history or a typological set of museum practices. I conclude with a reflection on potentiality, arguing that by releasing the function of theory from its authoritative and structural foundations, we liberate both conceptualisation and practice

Media Comforts and International Student Mobility: Managing Hopes, Host and Home

10.1080/07256868.2021.1939277Journal of Intercultural Studies424406-42

Ambient images

The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blasé attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a “blizzard of photographs.” In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-to-face encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram cliché, with “sourdough” becoming Google’s top food-related search phrase in 2020. The zoom boom soon became a new malaise—zoom fatigue. This adoption of virtual platforms was a profound incursion. It altered our sense of time and space as sense-making and social performance were increasingly aimed at and organised via camera and screen. Linear biographical narratives were cross-cut and spliced in novel ways. The image was less and less a document of an external reality, but more and more part of the new forms of mediated sociality. The diminution of physical engagements had an impact on how impressions were formed, what constituted the sensory triggers for memory, as well as shifting the markers for processes of understanding and decision-making. In this environment, images do not just multiply. Their increasing number also accentuates how they are stitched together to form new atmospheres, assemblages, iterations—or what we call the production of ambient images

Insights into Mechanisms of Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability – Roles of Free Radicals, Matrix Metalloproteinsases, and Caveolin-1

Free radicals, including reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS), are important mediators in cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury and other neurological diseases. Accumulation of toxic free radicals not only increase the susceptibility of brain tissue to ischemic damage but also trigger numerous molecular cascades, leading to increased blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability, brain edema, hemorrhage and inflammation, and brain death. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are one of the major targets in BBB breakdown. MMPs are proteolytic zinc-containing enzymes responsible for degradation of the extracellular matrix around cerebral blood vessels and neurons. Free radicals can activate MMPs and induce the degradations of tight junctions (TJs), leading to BBB breakdown. Recent studies indicate that caveolin-1, a 22 kDa membrane integral protein located at caveolae, can inhibit RNS production and MMPs activity, protect TJ proteins from degradation, and reduce the BBB permeability in cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury. The interaction of RNS, caveolin-1, and MMPs forms a positive feedback loop which provides amplified impacts on BBB dysfunction during cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury. Herein, we review the recent progress in the interaction of RNS, caveolin-1, and MMPs and the impact of the interaction on BBB permeability. For drug discovery, we summarize current evidence about antioxidant therapy in regulations of MMPs and caveolin-1 and anticipate the potential of developing antioxidants for the treatment of stroke and other neurological diseases. In conclusion, the interaction of RNS, caveolin-1, and MMPs could be a critical signal pathway in BBB disruption and infarction enlargement during cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury and other neurological diseases