New Visualities, New Technologies

Back in the 1980s Jean Baudrillard wrote that public space was collapsing due to a double obscenity: "The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media....The entire universe also unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen". He termed this the ecstasy of communication. But today, your everyday life is not just the potential grazing ground of the media, but of anyone with a cameraphone, and the entire universe unfolds not just at home but in the palm of your hand virtually anywhere you travel.Bringing together a transdisciplinary team of leading scholars from North America, Europe and Asia, this volume documents and theorizes this new visibility. It focuses on the proliferation and dispersal of a wide range of new visual technologies. It argues that these provide new ways and opportunities of seeing and being seen (webcams, mobile phone cams, CCTV and surveillance systems, cheap digital video recorders) and new ways of watching (on a desktop computer, a laptop with WiFi, or any number of mobile devices from mobile phones to iPods and PDAs, watching YouTube, MySpace videos, photoblogs, and other video both professional [e.g., episodes of Lost or The Office] and amateur). These new visual technologies embody a new regime of control and also new means of empowerment. The over-production of visual representations, the increasing number of roles these representations play, and the increasing circulation of images create a need for the conceptual understanding of new forms of seeing, looking, presenting, and hiding. What are the affective, cultural, social, and political dimensions of these new spaces of everyday visibility?This edited volumes surveys and theorizes aspects of this new assemblage of visuality (in terms of space, ethics, neoliberalism, data, militarization, invisibility, and identity) and traces particular vectors across this new assemblage (tracing cameraphones and artists, cameraphones and social networking in Asia, cameraphones and gender, lifelogging, YouTube and diaspora, race and profiling, and body language and surveillance). The new visual assemblage is being theorized and engaged from a great variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, and by artists as well as academics. Bringing these contributors together allows for a topical, transdisciplinary discussion of these issues for the first time.