For example "compositional interpretation" is applied to fine arts paintings and films (and video games, less convincingly); visual content analysis is applied to the study of National Geographic magazine photographs; semiology (semiotics) is almost entirely devoted to the study of advertising; psychoanalysis to the study of sexual difference in film. I'm interested in visuality as a kind of practice, done by human subjects in collaboration with different kinds of objects and technologies. But mostly I thought – they must be generated by AI, a generative AI like Midjourney, Dall-E or Stable Diffusion. In Chapter 12, Rose reflects and reviews the previous chapters through the lens of application developed in Chapter 11.

I interviewed women with young children about their photos, and also looked at the politics and ethics of family snaps moving into more public arenas of display when the people they picture are the victims of violence.Moreover, digital images are not all photographs, or part of profit-driven platforms, or even networked. Discourse disciplines subjects into certain ways of thinking and action, but this is not simply repressive; it does not impose rules for thought and behaviour on a pre-existing human agent.

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Ivin Yeo and I are hoping to organise one or two sessions at this year’s Royal Geographical Society conference in London in late August on the theme of ‘being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities’. When I’ve given various talks about the digital visualisation of new urban development projects, it surprises me how many people mention The Line – and not in a good way (see too the comments made about its YouTube promotional video). This text serves as a resource to understanding visuals as both material objects and tools of meaning making. The movie clearly didn’t lack the budget to show aliens or zombies, because the digital visual effects are impressive, but it chose not to: economic, social and political relations and dynamics clearly understandable from our contemporary moment are frightening enough. Whether drafting something new or revising an existing draft, sometimes you’re in the zone, in the flow yourself, and you can be writing flowingly.

Chapter 5 takes up the “prejudices” that exist within visuals by using a method named “semiology” which deals with how images make meaning. Firstly, there is the problem she highlights in the very first line of this book, “There’s an awful lot of hype around ‘the visual’ these days. Semiology: demands detailed analysis; performs case study; relies of semiotic theory and generates rich, useful discourse to talk about visual artifacts; uncovers how meaning is made in artifact and explores its social effects.Gillian Rose then goes on to investigate in detail the different methods for interpreting visual images. One way is to have a ‘randomised’ method – where you number the pictures and then have a random number table that tells you which pictures to pick. Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice is a two-year ethnographic study of how digital visualizing technologies are being used by architects in two large studios in London, both as part of their design process but also as a way of taking their designs through the planning process. Working out how the perspective of the image – essentially the horizon line – places the viewer says much about how the image is to be read. Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice′ was a two-year ethnographic study of how digital visualizing technologies are being used by architects in a number of architects′ studio in London.