Anders Michelsen – författare

In a contemporary and ever-changing society, ‘the visual’ has become a dynamic element that traverse all parts of current life all over the world – what in this book series is termed transvisuality. The present book is volume 3, which attempts to study the visual as it comes about: through the dynamic involvement in all sorts of articulations. The topics are in all volumes covered by introductions bring everything together under the new theme of transvisuality: the notion of visual as a cultural practice and constant dynamic that knows no representational limits and no framings. In this volume, the visual is seen as dynamic new and nonrepresentational matter – a ‘flesh’ which is researched from the particular vantage points of design of the visual and branding of the visual. In dialogue with radical new theories of the present, non-representational theory and new materialism, design and branding are surveyed from the viewpoint of business research, design studies, cultural studies, and practice – all focused on the visual. Topics covered are fashion blogging, DIY, Junk Space, handmade signage and public spaces in New Delhi, city branding, dance festivals and youtubing, visual branding in China and Multi-Sensory Retrieval Methods.

In contemporary society, ‘the visual’ becomes a traversing denominator passing through the most diverse articulations: from new media, branding, drone vision and robot culture to cityscapes, design and art. The transvisuality project in three volumes promotes the turn away from the predominance of a focus on representations in studies of visual culture. Volume 2 introduces visual organisation in-the-making as an effect of manifold traversing articulations and interconnected practices: how is the ‘stuff’ of visuality—an image like a photograph, an incident on TV, a cinematic oeuvre—intertwined in a range of cultural practices, transformed and transgressed by them in transvisuality.The aim of the book is to map how visual organizations are traversing culture as articulatory practices in situ. The resulting case studies take their departure in different materialities and agencies of empirical, embedded visuality—from canvas to drone camera—and illustrate how transvisuality evolves in and around publics and communities on the one hand and through bodies and media on the other. The visual articulations analysed in this volume span from cellphone videos to forensic images, from biomedia to robots, from bunker ruins to Kalighat pat paintings, from a Palestinian wedding dress to video footage of unknown strangers in a metro, from the Gorgon Stare to movies becoming art installations.While the first volume addresses the boundaries of the notion of visuality and creative openings that visual culture studies offer, the third volume maps visuality in contexts of design, creativity and brand management.

In a contemporary and ever-changing society, ‘the visual’ has become a dynamic element that traverse all parts of current life all over the world – what in this book series is termed transvisuality. The present book is volume 3, which attempts to study the visual as it comes about: through the dynamic involvement in all sorts of articulations. The topics are in all volumes covered by introductions bring everything together under the new theme of transvisuality: the notion of visual as a cultural practice and constant dynamic that knows no representational limits and no framings. In this volume, the visual is seen as dynamic new and nonrepresentational matter – a ‘flesh’ which is researched from the particular vantage points of design of the visual and branding of the visual. In dialogue with radical new theories of the present, non-representational theory and new materialism, design and branding are surveyed from the viewpoint of business research, design studies, cultural studies, and practice – all focused on the visual. Topics covered are fashion blogging, DIY, Junk Space, handmade signage and public spaces in New Delhi, city branding, dance festivals and youtubing, visual branding in China and Multi-Sensory Retrieval Methods.

In the passage from new media and tabloid culture, over political spin, branding and experience economy, to city scapes, design, and art in contemporary society, visual culture—visuality, ‘the visual’, ‘the image world’—is a key denominator. The book is the first volume of the project Transvisuality in three volumes, initiated by University of Copenhagen and Liverpool University Press. It collects leading scholars from all parts of the world in a scrutiny of what the visual means today. It builds on the debates on visual culture and visuality in the past decades studies of culture, but expands on these debates from the perspectives of theory, analysis and design. It shows how the visual impacts on the current world and transcends the most different aspects of the social: how the visual becomes transvisual by adapting and creating culture in the global, translocal world. It ultimately addresses the pervasive but puzzling claim of contemporary research that ‘the world has become more visual’ and tries to answer it. In the first volume the issue of the dimension of the visual is a paramount theme, seen from different interdisciplinary angles. Whether approaches are prone to nominalism and discourse or to issues of cognition and framing, the question of what the visual is and what impacts may pertain to it remains a fundamental challenge to cultural research.