Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds
Editor: Tracey Bowen and Mary Lou Nemanic
Date Of Publication: Mar 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1780-6
Isbn: 1-4438-1780-5
Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds foregrounds how the two important fields of visual culture and Internet culture interact. This collection of essays explores the intersections, overlaps and disparities in terms of how the two discourses illuminate our everyday negotiations as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and virtual/visual imaginings for constructing who we are. What is being examined here are the ways in which we use visual/virtual lenses to see the world both individually and collectively. This book represents a transnational effort that began as a series of conversations during the Mid Atlantic Popular/American Culture conferences from 2005–2009. The editors, a Canadian and an American, have included contributors across national and geographic contexts. Cultural Production is aimed at raising questions, crossing borders and presenting points of departure for future scholarship in the relatively new and very rapidly changing disciplines of visual and virtual cultures. Our critical approach to this study includes viewing Internet images as contested sites of cultural activity and also as sites that advance ideologies related to cultural transformation.

Mary Lou Nemanic has a PhD in American Studies and a masters degree in Mass Communications from the University of Minnesota. She is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications at Penn State University-Altoona. Dr. Nemanic has worked independently in documentary for more than 30 years. Her research is interdisciplinary with emphasis on cultural history, cultural studies and media studies. Her book, One Day for Democracy: Independence Day and the Americanization of Iron Range Immigrants was published in February 2007 by the Ohio University Press. Since the late 1970s she has collaborated on documentaries with her husband, Douglas Nemanic, an award-winning documentary producer and Guggenheim fellow. Working under the name Documentary America, they released their first feature-length ethnographic documentary in 2007, Cattlemen’s Days: The Grandaddy of Colorado Rodeos, on the 100th year celebration and history of cowboy culture in the Colorado high country. Cattlemen’s Days won Best Feature-length Documentary at the 2009 Iris Film Festival. Currently they are working on an ethnographic feature-length documentary about the Minnesota Iron Range, a mining area in northeastern Minnesota settled by more than 30 ethnic groups.

Tracey Bowen has a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She is a Lecturer in Communications, Culture and Information Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and coordinator of the fourth year internship program. Her research examines the tensions between physical and virtual ways of being in the world. In particular she has researched analogue and digital processes in art making, highlighted in the article titled “The cyborg subject position: Exploring a reconfigured sense of body and perception when making art in the cyborg realm and also how we use visual ways of thinking to negotiate physical and virtual contexts.” Her most recent work looks at the physicality of drawing within a digital culture and is published as Drawing within the Chiasm in Tracey: Contemporary Drawing research. She is also exploring the concept of graffiti as performance, which was the focus of her 2009 MAPACA presentation. As a practicing visual artist, Bowen is interested in visual literacies, alternative research processes and the use of drawing as a means of thinking through inquiry.

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