Spring 2010 Editor's Note
Posted in 2010 Journal | Tagged Editor's Note
In the Spring 2010 gnovis issue, our seven authors are weaving together themes of identity, technology and fragmentation. Digital technologies change the way we understand self, medium and space; however, they do not render obsolete our previous ways of knowing. Hence, our understandings of self, medium and space become sites where we patch together what is old with what is new.
In his article, Art on the Supply Side: Neoliberalism and Public Funding for the Arts, author Craig Medvecky examines how neoliberalism affected State funding of the arts. Specifically, Medvecky considers the censorship of “Cop Killer” as a case study for the complicated interaction between market, government and political art.
In Avoiding the “Update”: Thinking-Through Tele-visual Cartography, Matt Mingus offers a critical reading of the proliferation of digital maps. Considering these renderings as spatial narratives, Mingus calls for a recognition of the positionality of cartographers and the historical circumstances surrounding ever-changing representations of space.
In Media Fragmentation and Political Polarization: How a High Choice Media Environment Leads to Greater Selectivity, Fragmentation, and Polarization, Rebecca Chalif analyzes how high choice media affects political polarization. Central to Chalif’s analysis is a careful consideration of media fragmentation, which allows consumers to pick and choose at their leisure. Chalif’s article presents meaningful insights about the ways in which technology affects our daily choices.
Dusty Lavoie reads three Cronenberg films in On Reading Semanalytically: The Kristevian/Cronenbergian Abject, in order to utilize Kristeva’s frameworks of semanalysis and abjection. Specifically, Lavoie considers the way Kristeva’s frameworks can supplement cinema and critical studies through a merging of semiotics and psychoanalysis.
Alison McCarthy explores the complexity of the changing technologies of sound in Living with Digital, Resurrecting Analog, and Our Shifting Search for Sound. McCarthy considers how consumers negotiate and reconcile their needs alongside changing technologies, as well as how consumers use the market to influence which technologies are available to them.
Julie Espinosa considers how technologies transform conceptions of identity in The Advent of Myself as Other: Photography, Memory and Identity Creation. Through a close reading of photographic artifacts, Espinosa argues that technology need not be constructed as oppositional to the natural. Rather, she posits that technology should be considered integral to memory and self-narrative by extending the body.
In Street Level: Intersections of Art and the Law Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s “Heads” Project and Nussenzweig v. diCorcia, author Rachel A. Wortman analyzes the controversy surrounding the “Heads” photograph of Erno Nussenzweig, presenting the complicated relationship between private rights and public presentations of art. Wortman’s interdisciplinary approach to this case highlights questions of identity, ownership and technology.
My heartfelt thanks goes out to the gnovis staff and volunteers who worked tirelessly to bring this issue to life. I am thrilled about working with this team over the next year as Editor-in-Chief, because it is their dedication and creativity pushing gnovis to the next level.
It is with great pride that I offer you the Spring 2010 issue of the gnovis journal.
Enjoy the issue,
Lydia Kelow-Bennett