Visual Culture and Media Studies

Corporate consulting, a one-time seemingly marvelous mixture of bare-knuckle rationalization, esoterica, and visionary futurism, is invariably deployed when business structures threaten to lose their equilibrium. What it actually means to be consulted, the part played by media in consulting, and how the branch of corporate consulting became a system of knowledge with such a socially important role is the object of this book. For the first time, it explores the ways in which the latest media technology, avant-garde aesthetics, economic pressures, and holistic philosophy together constituted the form of consulting dominant today, and which consequences arise from this. Thus it follows the work of early corporate consultants like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and H. L. Gantt, while analyzing and describing their visual consulting models. The book develops a new, innovative, interdisciplinary approach, situated between media and business history, media archeology, and social theory, and thereby charts the genesis of modern consulting knowledge. It reveals that corporate consulting must be conceptualized in close relation to the visual culture that prevailed during this time, one which drew from nineteenth-century visualization methods and, more particularly, the new medium of film. Consulting is a cultural technique that is markedly characterized by media processes, in which the boundaries of economic logic and legitimacy emerge, and which, at the same time, considerably shapes and stabilizes this modus operandi up to the present day.

This article offers a first exploratory critique of digital tools' socio-technical affordances in terms of support for narrative creation by media researchers. More specifically, we reflect on narrative creation processes of research, writing and story composition by Media Studies and Humanities scholars, as well as media professionals, working with crossmedia and audio-visual sources, and the pivotal ways in which digital tools inform these processes of search and storytelling. Our study proposes to add to the existing body of user-centred Digital Humanities research by presenting the insights of a cross-disciplinary user study. This involves, broadly speaking, researchers studying audio-visual materials in a co-creative design process, set to fine-tune and further develop a digital tool (technically based on linked open data) that supports audio-visual research through exploratory search. This article focuses on how 89 researchers – in both academic and professional research s...

Cinema is considered as one of the most powerful mediums when it comes to influencing the audience. India is the largest producer of feature films in the world with global reach and Bollywood industry contributes largest number of films in Indian cinema; hence portrayal of any issue in Bollywood cinema becomes quite noteworthy. Studying the cinematic narratives of disability is important because it affects the way people understand, visualize and stereotype about physically challenged people in the real life. The dominant view of disability is based on the medical model that views disability as a functional limitation. According to this disability is a natural disadvantage suffered by disabled when placed in competitive social situations and it needs medical fixing. However, social model gives a modern alternative and stresses upon inclusion and acceptability of disability in society. According to this, disability is caused by the way society is organized instead of the person's impairment so the barriers restricting choices of disabled should be removed from the society. This research aims at analyzing the representations and narratives of physically challenged characters in contemporary Bollywood cinema. Previous studies show that Indian movies have been portraying differently-abled characters with a tone of pity, sarcasm, dependency and ridicule. But the way disabled characters are being represented in movies after the millennium seems a bit different.

Co-Author, with Daniela Bleichmar.
This essay defines the category of ‘‘visual history’’ and introduces its operations across the essays included in this special issue. It proposes that such narratives accelerated time in cultures where it became increasingly common to traverse spatial distances. In this way, visual histories are not
simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself.

Chinese people should consume Chinese products! This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern nation with its own national products. From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China's burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message--patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese. In China Made, Karl Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world--nationalism and consumerism--developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century,...

Social media platforms have quickly transformed communication, relationships, identities, education and power relations. These platforms have also become a popular topic for discussion and research, yet most claims made about social media are very general. This course takes an anthropological approach to social media in order to speak about the ways social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. The course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms, and also explores social media as a research method for understanding how people's lives converge in both online and offline spaces. We will consider the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender and sexual identities, and among people who are differently embedded in global systems. Course Objectives Students will be able to: 1. explain key terms that are central to an anthropological understanding of social media 2. relate social media to topics of cultural and social diversity 3. relate issues in the study of social media with power relations, ideology, and social institutions 4. think comparatively in terms of both universals of social media as well as local inflections 5. apply anthropological methods to their own project 6. apply key themes, theories, and approaches of anthropology to their own analysis

[Article's introduction] Born a decade prior to the Islamic Revolution, Marjane Satrapi grew up in the midst of turmoil. Her critically acclaimed graphic memoir Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which spans the years immediately before and after the Revolution, and its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, have found an abundant readership around the world. As Satrapi indicates in her introduction to the first volume, in creating this narrative of her life, she hoped to provide non-Iranians, particularly those in the West, with a more accurate perspective on Iran. Implicit in this aim is a distinction between the Iranian Self and the Western Other, with the latter constituting Satrapi’s major implied audience. While the didactic aspects of the two Persepolis volumes cannot be denied, another, perhaps less appreciated, aspect of Satrapi’s work resides in its critical dialogue with Iranian culture. Satrapi’s assertion at the end of her introduction to Persepolis—“One can forgive but one should never forget”—applies as much to Iranians as to Western readers and reflects her attention to the Self as the other important implied audience for the text. Indeed, as Amy Malek notes, many Iranian readers have praised Satrapi’s work “for preserving the communal memory of a generation” (375). In narrating her own memories, Satrapi critically intervenes in the culture and politics of censorship and compulsory veiling under the post-revolutionary Islamic regime and touches upon the important psychological consequences of such tactics of repression.

By choosing to present her story through the medium of comics, Satrapi further establishes a dialogue with the Other, in the form of her engagement with the established Western attitudes and aesthetic values that surround the production and reception of comics. Satrapi’s relative unfamiliarity with comics before producing the Persepolis volumes seems to have contributed to her eclectic approach to the medium. Her style shows influences from various sources, not only the cartooning style of her mentor, David B., but also the tradition of Persian miniature painting and probably the satiric political cartoons that at one point appeared in newspapers and magazines in her native country. Yet Satrapi has clearly forged a cohesive, and very distinctive, style of her own, one that successfully deploys the expressive visual language of the medium.

The dissertation thesis proposes a comparative study of two contemporary strategies in visual rhetoric – the Anglo-Saxon visual culture studies and the Francophone visual semiotic projects.
The study reconstructs and applies both rhetorical strategies to the interpretation of variable visual images and objects of visual communication and demonstrates how both observed rhetorical schemes for the evaluation of visual imagery can be used for the aims of the contemporary social critique and cultural history.
I find the theoretical and methodological basis for both interpretative models in the debate for the end of art history (Danto, Belting, Vattimo, Gadamer etc.) end the idea for the iconic (Boehm) or pictorial (Mitchell) turn.
The first part of the study clarifies the relations between two strategies in the investigation of visual culture: the visual rhetoric and visual argumentation studies framed in the Anglo-Saxon academic context of the of the so called visual studies and the francophone visual semiotics/rhetoric.
Following the framework described through the concepts of “cultural” (Jameson) and “pictorial turn” (Mitchell) the thesis reconstructs the both investigated strategies and draws their taxonomy and concepts: visuality, visual image and visual culture (Mitchell, Mirzoeff), visual persuasion (Messairs), visual argument and argumentation (Blair, Birdsell, Groarke) lay viewer (Foss), visual sign (Groupe µ), visual trope and metaphor (Durand , Forceville, Groupe µ) etc.
The semiotic attention of the study proposes an analysis of visual artifacts and visual communication observing the transformation of the French based ‘rhétorique de l'image’ (Roland Barthes and Jacques Durant) to the fundamental project for ‘rhétorique visuelle’ of the Belgian Groupe µ and it's visual figures taxonomy.

La présente étude est une analyse diachronique de la presse satirique au Cameroun. Elle retrace le parcours de ce genre journalistique dans un contexte politique caractérisé par l'ambition hégémonique de l'État qui est défavorable à l'épanouissement d'une presse satirique libre. En effet, les régimes qui se sont succédés à la tête de l'État camerounais depuis son indépendance en 1960, n'ont eu de cesse de contenir la presse privée en général et la presse satirique en particulier. Du fait de son caractère à la fois burlesque et sarcastique que le politique a tôt fait d'assimiler à une sorte d'indiscipline, la presse satirique a particulièrement été dans le collimateur du commandement. Après avoir été étouffée pendant une trentaine d'années (1960-1990), il a fallu attendre que le corset autoritaire commence à être secoué au début des années 1990 pour voir cette presse prendre ses marques. En réalité, l'ouverture démocratique dont l'un des corolaires a été l'élaboration d'un cadre juridique favorable à la liberté d'expression a participé à animation de l'espace public camerounais. Toutefois, l'institution de la liberté d'expression n'a paradoxalement pas pour autant garanti l'indépendance de la presse satirique. Celle-ci a continué à faire l'objet d'un contrôle assidu de la part du commandement, ce qui a donné lieu à une pratique politique ambivalente qui alterne entre ouverture juridique et fermeture politique sur fond de répression et d'intimidation.

In the age of the novel, we read fiction sequentially and unselfconsciously. This practice requires us to ignore the materiality and appearance of books, for these factors disrupt narrative absorption. "The Look of the Book" explores specific books from England and America whose visual and material characteristics resist and redefine habitual experiences of reading prose. These specimens connect word and image in the book format, and they therefore resist the theories of critics since Gotthold Lessing that have separated visual and verbal modes.

Lessing's contemporary, Laurence Sterne, uses visual elements in Tristram Shandy (1760–67) to digress from the reading sequence while furthering the overall narrative. Sterne's techniques also establish a taxonomy of the book's constituent variables. In the twentieth century, as bookmaking technologies became more widely accessible, a printing renaissance brought artists into book design. Vanessa Bell creates images and designs page layouts to amplify her sister Virginia Woolf's ekphrastic fiction in the third "decorated" edition of Woolf's Kew Gardens (Hogarth Press, 1927). The illustrations change the pace of reading by integrating word, image and book structure. In Tom Phillips' A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Sheherezade: A Flip Book, by artist Janet Zweig and author Holly Anderson, words are inseparable from the visual layout of the page, and the resulting written texts create temporally fractured narratives. These postmodern artists' books show that narrative fiction and the physical novel are both malleable structures.

In all of these works, the "book composer," who masterminds the visual arrangement of the text, influences the reading experience in ways that have not been explored in the context of literary criticism. As predictions about the 'death of the book' circulate in the academy and popular media, this dissertation suggests that books can make available complex modes of reading that we generally do not expect from novels. This interdisciplinary approach is essential at a time when images pervade the cultural context and are being integrated more thoroughly into print media.

All framing devices have the effect of sharply demarcating the boundaries of the representational space by ensuring both the island-like structure of pictures and the beholder’s awareness of being in front of ‘nothing but images.’ It is precisely this separateness, and, with it, the equation of representation with depiction, that is being more and more challenged by hyperrealistic, immersive, and interactive virtual environments that blur the threshold between image and reality, thus eliciting in the experiencer a strong feeling of being incorporated into quasi-real worlds. Drawing on phenomenology, media philosophy, visual culture studies and techno-aesthetics, this book introduces (and critically examines) the notion of 'unframing' as a key to understanding this radically new iconoscape.

This slogan “Chinese people should consume Chinese products!” was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.” From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message—patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese.

In China Made, Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world—nationalism and consumerism—developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.

Post-modern culture, or rather what we could call, using Philippe
Dubois’ terms, the postphotography and postcinema condition, tends to
blur the ontological frontiers of photography and cinema. Territories that
once stood on their own no longer have easy-to-define boundaries. Instead,
photography and cinema are dissolving the grounds of their formerly
assumed differences by systematically evoking the effects of the other. As
such, cinema is often experienced as if it were a still image (Mulvey 2006)
whenever artists and directors choose to fix the camera and stop the image
(using new media technologies). Likewise, photography tends to evoke
movement by recovering some of the aesthetic features that had been
explored by the Futurists in the 1910s (the stroboscopic photography usedby Antonio Giulio Bragaglia is a key example of this tendency). Examples of working on move by alternating the movement within the still image can be seen in the works of artists such as David Clarebout, Thierry
Kuntzel and Sam Taylor-Wood.
Chris Marker was key to this shifting processes. He was an artist who
always looked for new combinations of sound, image and text, both as a
director and as a publisher. His seminal film La Jetée (1962, released in
1963) was made up of photographs separately glued on to different sheets
of paper, and filmed afterwards.
Given the 50 years since its release, we decided to organize a
conference on Photography and Cinema, recalling the memory of La Jetée
and the issues this celebrated film ended up disseminating. This books gathers the best contributions coming out from that conference.

Culture of the Selfie is an in-depth art-historical overview of self-portraiture, using a set of theories from visual studies, narratology, media studies, psychotherapy, and political principles. Collecting information from various fields, juxtaposing them on the historical time-line of artworks, the book focuses on space in self-portraits, shared between the person self-portraying and the viewer. What is the missing information of the transparent relationship to the self and what kind of world appears behind each selfie? As the 'world behind one's back' is gradually taking larger place in the visual field, the book dwells on a capacity of selfies to master reality, the inter-mediate way and, in a measure, oneself.

Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, in: Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, Proceedings of the International Conference at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 15-16 July, 2016, eds. Ulrich Blanchè and Ilaria Hoppe, Lisbon 2018, pp. 10-12

ABSTRACT
Since the 1950s, both scholars and practitioners examining the gatekeeper functions of the news media have sought to explain why some issues and events become newsworthy while others remain obscure. Subsequently, in 1965 Galtung and Ruge published a seminal paper on “news values”—aspects of events that make them more likely to receive coverage. However, the consent among media scholars and professionals that the press is responsible for informing, educating and entertaining the public, highlights the duty and power the press has in a given society like Uganda. Therefore, this thesis is an exploration of “news values in the Ugandan newspapers”.
The major aim of this study was to determine the most common news value in the Ugandan newspapers. The study also aimed at exploring news values in both the domestic and foreign news published in the selected Ugandan newspapers. Furthermore, the study intended to notice the differences between the New Vision where the government is a majority shareholder and the Daily Monitor a private newspaper in their news values.
This study was grounded on the “news value theory”; the justification for adopting this theory is due to its effectiveness in clarifying the reason for which specific news are chosen for publication in a newspaper, despite the presence of thousands of daily news. In this study, the researcher adopted a survey methodology with focus on the content analysis technique. The researcher analyzed content of twelve issues of all news items published in the year 2011 by The New Vision and The Daily Monitor, the two Ugandan major dailies.
Results of this study found nine dominant news values in the news published in the Ugandan newspapers. These are; human interest" that had an overall percentage of 16%, followed by "unambiguity" with 14%. Whereas "humor", "frequency" and "meaningfulness" had a similar percentage of 11%. More so, "reference to elite persons" had 10% "Negativity" had 6%, while "Unexpectedness" and "Consonance" had 4% respectively.

This paper examines the burst of visual production that emerged from and around Indian-occupied Kashmir in July 2016, when the Indian paramilitary and police began to implement for the first time a tactic of mass blinding as a way of quelling surging protests against the Indian state. I consider a selection of visual texts that intervene in the optical regime undergirding the Indian occupation, one that has arguably elicited Indian support in part via a systematic erasure of the humanity of Kashmiris who favour self-determination (or ‘azadi’). In the face of this optical regime, I examine the visual and narrative tactics through which pro-azadi Kashmiris stake claims to humanity – by putting wounded Kashmiri bodies on spectacular display, graphically foregrounding Kashmiri bodily vulnerability in acts of public grieving, and seeking to interpellate a global political community through an appeal to a shared humanity. As these urgent claims to a larger human community are voiced, this paper asks what it means for Kashmiris to take on the burden of ‘performing humanity’ in these ways, especially given the explicit cautions in visual studies and human rights scholarship around spectacular exhibitions of vulnerability. Rather than assume that showcasing vulnerability can never incite transformation, I closely examine the possibilities of particular visual forms—photojournalism and digital activism—in relaying vulnerability and attempting to claim and recraft humanity.

Texto en linea: http://www.e-imagen.net/project/de-kepler-a-google-street-view-la-perspectiva-cenital-como-dispositivo-de-la-vision/

Resumen

El siglo XVII ha sido llamado la época de la observación. Perspectiva y descripción fueron dos modos de hacer visible la visión y representarla. Se trataba de dos modos de producir una imagen. Evidencia, medición y observación se combinaron para producirlas. A diferencia de la cartografía, donde la proyección matemática no suponía la existencia de una posición de sujeto, la perspectiva cenital – entendida como un dispositivo de la visión – define la posición de un sujeto que mira o es mirado. El ojo de Dios (un ojo telemático, que puede estar en todas partes) establecía una relación del ser humano con el cosmos, una posición de sujeto en el interior de un microcosmos. Pero qué sucede con los nuevos medios digitales. Qué posición otorgan al sujeto dispositivos como Google Earth y Google Street View. La transposición de la perspectiva cenital como dispositivo de la visión a la cultura visual 2.0 supone una mirada que ya no alude al ojo de Dios. Estos nuevos dispositivos combinan la perspectiva vertical con ciertos elementos de la experiencia inmersiva y la utopía telemática, presentes a lo largo de la historia de los medios de la imagen como es el caso de los Panoramas del siglo XVIII o los espejos en la Edad Media. Una mirada cenital donde las cámaras robóticas de los 9 ojos de Google despliegan el ejercicio de una soberanía vertical descorporizada (Hito Steyerl) que instaura una nueva normalidad visual incorporada en las tecnologías de vigilancia, creando una especie de hábito corporal y visual completamente alejado de la celebración de las lentes del siglo XVII y la pasión por la descripción del mundo.

Abstract:
The seventeenth century has been called the time of observation. Perspective and description were two ways to make the vision visible and to represent it. Unlike cartography, where mathematical projection did not imply the existence of a subject position, the zenith perspective – understood as an apparatus of vision – defines the position of a subject that looks or is looked at. The eye of God (a telematic eye, which can be everywhere) established a relationship of the human being with the cosmos, a position of subject within a microcosm. But what happens with the new digital media. What position the subject gives devices such as Google Earth and Google Street View. These new devices combine the vertical perspective with certain elements of the immersive experience and telematic utopia, present throughout the history of the media of the image as is the case of Panoramas or mirrors in the Middle Ages. An overhead view where the robotic cameras of the 9 eyes of Google display the exercise of a vertical de-corporated sovereignty (Hito Steyerl) that establishes a new visual normality incorporated in surveillance technologies, creating a kind of corporal and visual habit completely removed from the celebration of the lenses of the seventeenth century and passion for the description of the world.

This paper argues that stereoscopic technology, deepening space, may also be related to the concept of Time-Image, although a frozen image. Stereoscopic viewing deepens space as well as it invites the viewer to take time in scanning this deepness, deepening in this way, time itself in such a way as to make the observer aware of his/her own look, moving his/her eyes through the image, resembling Deleuze's definition of the cinema of time. I compare the work of the stereoscopic photographer and Portuguese film pioneer Aurélio Paz dos Reis, and his experiments with movement, illusion and narrative in stereoscopy, with the experimental approach by Chris Marker, namely in his "photographic film" La Jetée.

This essay aims to study the correlations between Graffiti and New Media cultures, in order to create a field of research in which they are analyzed together. It begins with the idea of Graffiti as a relational medium in the urban public space and its translation into the online one. It proceeds to develop parallelisms between hacker culture, tactical media, and graffiti regarding the way they hack space against capitalism and private property. The last part discusses some examples of projects regarding graffiti and technology, where the last one is not only a tool but a fundamental part of the whole process.

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In the age of the novel, we read fiction sequentially and unselfconsciously. This practice requires us to ignore the materiality and appearance of books, for these factors disrupt narrative absorption. "The Look of the Book" explores specific books from England and America whose visual and material characteristics resist and redefine habitual experiences of reading prose. These specimens connect word and image in the book format, and they therefore resist the theories of critics since Gotthold Lessing that have separated visual and verbal modes. Lessing's contemporary, Laurence Sterne, uses visual elements in Tristram Shandy (1760–67) to digress from the reading sequence while furthering the overall narrative. Sterne's techniques also establish a taxonomy of the book's constituent variables. In the twentieth century, as bookmaking technologies became more widely accessible, a printing renaissance brought artists into book design. Vanessa Bell creates images and...

In this paper, I analyze young women’s video remixes of the teen drama Gossip Girl. With its emphasis on glamour, style, and status and its interpellation of young female viewers as the ideal consumers within neoliberal regimes, Gossip Girl bears many of the marks of postfeminist media. Drawing on an archive of videos posted to YouTube during the program’s first two seasons, I show how young video makers reimagine the program’s postfeminist aesthetics. Gossip Girl fan videos frequently seek to create emotional intensity through repetition of close-ups on the female face.  They also use innovative digital editing techniques to alter television’s realist aesthetic and portray split, fragmented or contradictory subjects. This focus on the face and amplification of affect cuts out the source text’s emphasis on the teenage body as a vehicle for product placement, and challenges the neoliberal privileging of economic success and independence. At the same time, the videos also contain their own limitations, reproducing the young female body as a site of spectacle.

Paradoxical Modes In the last decade a new form of comic book has emerged that claims status as documentary. By virtue of its relationship with the cinematograph, the documentary is the perfect heir of the mimetic-photographic-temporal-narrative tradition, while the comic book belongs to the opposite tradition, a hidden one, and, therefore, it is essentially the representative of a completely different mindset, even though it can use dramaturgical or narrative tools similar to those of its opposite. The paradox is even more evident from the point of view of the documentary film establishment, which watches astonished how a drawing medium claims the heritage of such a recognized cinema-photographic tradition. The comic book is, in essence, anti-photographic. It dramatically severs the impetuous line that, from Renaissance painting to cinema, has been nourishing a type of aesthetics in which, around the mimetic vocation, the idea of visual transparency (the famous metaphor of Alberti's window) and that of the narrative-flow as an axis that vertebrates the representation of an equally translucent time blend together. Photography is the turning point where the pictorial graphic imagination becomes a technical expression of reality itself, which it drops on the threshold of film movement and, therefore, of the temporal paradigm. The comic book is contrary to this development, and causes an unexpected bifurcation that connects with the path of the pre-Renaissance polyptych and, therefore, with a forgotten anti-Aristotelian imagination that is opposed, in the field of the image, to Leonardo's famous recommendation about the appropriateness of artists painting only one place, one time, and one subject, equivalent to Aristotle's rule of the three unities (those of action, time, and place that should structure dramaturgy, according to his Poetics). In photography, this rule is part of the apparatus and, therefore, unavoidable, unless the images are subsequently recomposed; in comics it is the exact opposite. If the photographic technique is Aristotelian by nature, that of comics is essentially anti-Aristotelian, even though eventually the deep attraction of mimetic realism brought the classic tradition of comics to imitate, in a more symbolic than naturalistic way, the spatial transparency and fluidity of temporary-photographic media. This deviation of comics from representation's hegemonic trend, which occurred long before the equivalent avant-garde ruptures in painting and literature, is important because it indicates the existence of an imaginary being suppressed by established aesthetics, and it underlines the enlightening power of visual forms. The comic book's tendency to mimic classic narrative by diluting the presence of the page in favor of a series of vignettes arranged as lines of a text shows precisely the relevance of the page's global space that this distribution is trying to diminish. Some authors will soon notice the importance of this global space. For example, In The Yellow Kid (1895) by Outcault the dramaturgy of the entire page is the one that usually predominates, while in Topffer comics, created more than half century earlier, the vignette's structure is the one always used.

The results of research on the use of creating mandalas after perceiving photos of 2014 events in different regions of Ukraine is presented in the article.The use of «Mandala» technique in media education with the purpose of understanding one’s own feelings and developing the capacity for reflection after viewing visual stimuli is substantiated. Analysis of mandalas allowed to evaluate the features of attitude towards the motherland, current social and political events, consequences, which affected the psychic, and the degree of traumatization in population, differences in perception in different regions of the country. Predominant perception of the country is as of mother, who cares, worries, provides protection. Events in our country in 2014 often cause anger, aggression – especially among the citizens of the Western part of the country, as well as disgust, apathy, fatigue, loss of capacity to experience joy and pleasure. Mandala as an art therapy tool not only helps to determine the state of individual, his attitude to the presented media products, but also promotes creating conditions for processing trauma – processing of intensive feelings with further potential of understanding and expressing them simultaneously.

This article will present the magic lantern shows that the Catalan optician Francisco Dalmau (1810-1886) offered in his establishment between 1844 and 1848. Being a key figure on the introduction of the telephone and phonograph in Spain, his interest in optical shows has been obscured by his scientific activities. I will first discuss the presence of the magic lantern in Barcelona at the beginning of the century, to then consider Dalmau’s shows and his interplay with the media landscape of his time. By focusing on Dalmau's shows, this article also casts a new light on the presence and development of the magic lantern in Barcelona, such as the introduction of the dissolving views.