Zanele Muholi's Affective Appeal to Act
ABSTRACT This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of “citizenship” and the “civil contract of photography” call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's “empathic vision” describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently—where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.
5 Reflections on Trans* & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi)
Abstract This reflection juxtaposes African queer studies and visual studies to consider how African queerness is represented. Taking the work of Kenyan photographer Neo Musangi as its point of departure, it foregrounds questions raised by representations of trans individuals about the politics of knowledge and the ethics of opacity. As trans activists and intellectuals have noted, the visual is an especially vexed site of gendered policing, and I consider how quotidian habits of visual analysis risk performing similar policing. Instead of situating trans visual art and activism as exceptional, as requiring special analytic tools, I argue that it teaches us to re-think our assumptions about all African art, refusing to take for granted gendered, sexed, and sexualised categories and practices.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.