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The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19 Crisis

Metadata
TitleThe Pandemic Visual Regime
SubtitleVisuality and Performativity in the Covid-19 Crisis
ContributorJulia Ramírez-Blanco(editor)
Francesco Spampinato(editor)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0448.1.00
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-pandemic-visual-regime-visuality-and-performativity-in-the-covid-19-crisis/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJulia Ramírez-Blanco & Francesco Spampinato
Publisherpunctum books
Publication placeEarth, Milky Way
Published on2023-11-09
ISBN978-1-68571-124-5 (Paperback)
978-1-68571-125-2 (PDF)
Long abstractThe Covid-19 pandemic has been expressed in various ways through visuality and performance, and some of its more nuanced cultural implications have taken place in a realm that goes beyond words. Through the exploration of the visual culture produced during and in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19 Crisis highlights the key role played by images in shaping our understanding of the epochal transformations our society is undergoing. This book argues that visuality and its relationships with the performative have played such a significant role in the Covid-19 pandemic that we can even speak of the emergence of a “pandemic visual regime,” a new way of seeing and representing the world under this global emergency. Through an interdisciplinary framework, The Pandemic Visual Regime aims to answer an array of questions: In which ways have the effects of the pandemic been racialized, thereby reinforcing white supremacy? How are our responses to Covid-19 shaped by the Hollywood “outbreak narrative” of films such as Contagion? How has design responded to our new pandemic needs? How have infographics affected our perception? In which new ways have we come to inhabit private, public, and virtual space? Regarding the latter, what changes have there been in the forms of digital surveillance? On the other side of the spectrum, what forms has mutual aid taken and what have been our forms of relating with nature, both during lockdown and after lockdown was over? All these questions open the field to rethinking the visuality of our post-pandemic zeitgeist.
Print length268 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Dimensions127 x 203 mm | 5" x 8" (Paperback)
LCCN2023946988
THEMA
  • MJCJ4
  • JBFF
  • JBCC
BIC
  • JFFC
  • MJCJ
  • JFD
BISAC
  • MED022090
  • SOC052000
Keywords
  • COVID-19
  • visual studies
  • performance
  • speculative design
  • film studies
  • digital culture
  • social movements
  • animal studies
  • dystopia
Funding
  • Agencia Statal de Investigación
  • Project: Histopia (PID2021-123465NB-I00), 2022–2025
  • Grant: AEI/10.13039/501100011033
Contents

Frontmatter

(pp. 1–10)
  • Julia Ramírez-Blanco
  • Francesco Spampinato

Introduction: The Invisible Made Visible

(pp. 11–23)
  • Francesco Spampinato
  • Julia Ramírez-Blanco

Pandemic Visuality: Immunopolitics, White Seeing-Space, and the Police

(pp. 25–61)
  • Nicholas Mirzoeff

From "Contagion" to Covid: How Hollywood Turns Viral Fear into Viral Profits

(pp. 63–89)
  • Dahlia Schweitzer

Wearable Virus Shields: From Futuristic Dystopias to Actual Dread

(pp. 91–116)
  • Francesco Spampinato

Covid-19 Comics and the Data Visualization of Everyday Life

(pp. 117–148)
  • Alexandra Alberda
  • Anna Feigenbaum

Going Viral: Survival Design

(pp. 149–193)
  • Manuel Olveira

The Rise of Digital Governmentality in the Era of Covid-19

(pp. 195–216)
  • Ramón Reichert

Societies in Movement: Pandemic Crisis and Prefigurative Responses

(pp. 217–236)
  • Marina Sitrin

Pandemic Pastoral

(pp. 237–258)
  • Julia Ramírez-Blanco

Backmatter

(pp. 259–263)
  • Julia Ramírez-Blanco
  • Francesco Spampinato
Contributors

Julia Ramírez-Blanco

(editor)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5068-4613

Julia Ramírez-Blanco is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at Complutense University, Madrid. Her work connects art history, utopian studies, and activism. She is author of Artistic Utopias of Revolt (Palgrave, 2018); 15M: El tiempo de las plazas (Alianza, 2021); Amigos, disfraces y comunas (Cátedra, 2022); La ciudad del Sol: Le mouvement 15M entre formes et performances (Éditions Lorelei, 2023). Member of the Research Collective of the C4AA, she also has co-led the research and exhibition project Grande Révolution Domèstique-Guise on feminist utopias. She has amply collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and has curated the 15M materials for the recent reorganization of the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. In Reina Sofía, she is part of the core group of “Tejidos Conjuntivos,” the Museum’s Study Programme in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices, and Cultural Studies.

Francesco Spampinato

(editor)
associate professor in the Department of the Arts at Università di Bologna
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8098-2838

Francesco Spampinato is an associate professor in the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna. His research in the fields of contemporary art history and visual studies is focused on the relationships between contemporary art, media, and technology, with particular attention to topics such as postmodernism, collective practices, media experimentations, and the effect of personal computers and the internet on visual culture. His latest publications include Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022); the edited monographs GMM—Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici: Computer Comics 1984–1987 (NERO, 2021), and Ran Slavin: Shapeshifter (Mousse Publishing, 2022); and monographic essays for either academic journals or exhibition catalogues on Public Movement (PAJ, 2018), Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin (Fondazione Prada, 2019), USCO (Visual Culture Studies, 2020), Studio Alchimia (Palinsesti, 2021), Susan Kare (Imago, 2022), and Kraftwerk (NeoClassica, 2023).