Seite 15 [15]
OCR
Within and Across the Media Borders experiences of wars place the processes of othering in their specific political and social context. Ihese processes themselves bear, however, global characteristics, too. The current volume, in addition to being a continuation of the project started in 2010, is also an attempt to deepen the research and to present the specificity of the eastern European gaze in many ways. The World as not yet Overwhelmed by Images During the 1940s to the 1970s, the amount of visual data with which people interacted increased dramatically. The types of media multiplied, and the amount of space (public and private) occupied by such images grew. To answer, in part, whether the increasing number of the types of media and of their products enabled people to understand and depict the surrounding world in a new way, we may say that this growth of visual information resulted in an increasing role of images in the process of the construction of identity. In other words, the constant circulation of images, their repetitiveness, and the frequency of interaction with them has changed the perception of reality, and of the Other. Visual representations as an instrument of communication exercised a more and more significant impact on the life of average people. We hope that this volume provides some preliminary insights into the tools and processes by which the new media changed the perception of reality. There have always existed social forms for the preservation and transmission of information (e.g. oral culture, narratives, jokes, gossip, i.e. word of mouth information). The visual form may be identified as a technique for preserving messages across a greater distance. It constitutes a form of communication with a wider and also spatially distanced audience. According to Anderson's now classical definition (1972: 5), ‘communication is a dynamic process in which a person consciously or unconsciously influences the perceptions of other people. Therefore, by analyzing the visual data we try to decode the implicit information hidden—both by the author and by the cultural patterns guiding the particular ways of perception and depiction—in a picture, a photograph, or a movie. It is highly probable that such visual signs are important also for the recipients of the message, confirming their values, and some meanings that are significant for them. It is, however, possible that the meaning inscribed in a picture is contested or read 4 rebours. We try to grasp in this volume all the mentioned ways of interacting with visual data. ‘The meaning of visual representations derives, however, not only from the messages present in them, but also from the very materiality of the object or the kind of media it is transmitted by—for example, illustration, photograph, movie. Laura Marks (2000: 170), writing on the beginnings of cinema, pinpointed the certain struggle between the material significance of the object and the representational power of the image. The struggle is related to the two ways of dealing with visual data—their use that is inevitably connected to (a) the representational content and (b) their materiality. Moreover, in every visual representation we have two levels of 13
