Sometimes it’s garbage not because it’s badly written in and of itself, but because it doesn’t fit the main flow. Whereas one of the reasons I so much enjoyed Andor, and Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune, is that their VFX are somehow much more minimal. Or that’s the theory anyway – as with cyber/intelligent/smart cities, there’s a lot of hype as well as some serious experimentation going on – experimentation which is not being carried out by social media platforms, nor always for profit…). For example, I started off counting how many girls appeared in images, but it quickly became obvious that you could have twice as many boys in a picture and the picture would still be about the girls. Mostly it focused on the castration complex – where women are castrated males – and I found that all a bit daft.

Chapter four is the last chapter that looks at the proposed principals of visual theory, where the rest of the text either involves case studies or cultural intersections. One of the exhibition’s many pleasures is its concern to emphasise that this tradition of painting was in dialogue with other forms of visual art practice from 1600. This blog is about how people make and encounter images, and what happens in those encounters (that’s what I mean by visual culture).

Splits include those between illegible computational processes and the legible image; or the invisual and the visual; or the representational and the not; or the network and the everyday. And also, lots of the digital scholarship I’ve been reading recently – in urban studies, media studies and so on – focuses on platforms and takes a strongly marxist and/or materialist analysis.

For the latter moments, I try to break writing down into smaller pieces and keep some small pieces to one side that are easier to accomplish when things feel sticky: a careful summary of existing work, for example. The main idea here is that, “interpreting images is just that, interpretation, and not the discovery of their ‘truth’.They are perhaps beginning to look more absurd and even offensive than simply a bit of typical marketing to be cynical about. So minimal VFX seem less fixated on visual details, less interested in making everything totally visible, less concerned to add elaborate detail to every surface.

It’s kind of heroic public art/messaging, but more suburban and, as Roland also showed with his image of a ‘family barbecue in a redwood valley’, with very traditional social content: white straight families, in Roland’s example. Gillian Rose then goes on to investigate in detail the different methods for interpreting visual images.How you code should be independently verifiable and this can only be the case if you get someone else to code the images according to the categories you pick independently of you, and then see what results they get in comparison to you.