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'King Khufu's tomb, the Great Pyramid of Gizeh (from N.W.), Egypt', Underwood and Underwood, c.1900 (courtesy of Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter).
Source publication
One of the most popular of all nineteenth‐century optical recreations was the stereoscope. Most previous studies, however, have focused on its initial popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, downplaying the fact that stereoscopy enjoyed a significant revival between 1890 and 1914 to the extent that its diffusion in schools, homes and libraries was proba...
Citations
... Underwood & Underwood targeted schools, colleges, libraries, and individuals. The company used direct mail, endorsements, display advertising, and door-to-door salesmen to promote and sell their merchandise (Plunkett, 2008;DeLeskie, 2000). Individual sales were primarily focused on households and businesses in small towns and rural areas (Davis, 2015, pp. ...
Using the framework of the tourist gaze to investigate Underwood & Underwood’s Egypt, a 1905 stereoview boxed set with an accompanying book by James Henry Breasted, which is part of a larger collection of stereoview boxed sets by the same company, this paper will define the tourist gaze, provide a brief overview of Underwood & Underwood’s stereoview boxed sets, and examine how Egypt and its cultural heritage are perceived through an outsider’s orientation and set of values as well as the ramifications of this perception. This will be accomplished by focusing on Breasted’s textual depictions of the contemporary Egyptian at the beginning of the twentieth century in the set’s accompanying book, Egypt through the Stereoscope, and included on some of the back sides of the stereoviews in the Egypt set.
Article published in the International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media 5 (1). https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/stereo/article/view/7689.
I argue that View‐Master reels upheld the colonial legacy of previous stereoscopic depictions of Indigenous subjects while inaugurating new methods of asserting power in exhibition via its ease of use and “black‐box” structure. Further, focusing on the instrumentalization of stereoscopy allows us to think through how these images intervene in the history of the representation of Indigenous subjects across image media and histories of photographic technology and consumption. In sum, although stereoscopy functions as a marketable tool for narrativizing colonial power, its affective qualities and historical contexts complicate fantasies of unilateral viewing and domination and bring forth histories of resistance.
This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic.
In this paper, I argue that the practices of stereoscopic photography throughout the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century can be interpreted as technological answers to many of the questions raised by the theories of art regarding the landscape genre, such as immersion, volume, scale, and subjectivity. However, it was not a direct influence, since stereoscopic photography was perceived as part of popular culture and, thus, excluded from the artistic field. Stereoscopy’s middlebrow reputation is largely due to the perception that photography’s automated character and its mass diffusion as a visual commodity would prevent it from gaining any artistic value. To assert the possibility of a filiation in landscape theories, I focus on two essays by Georg Simmel, ‘The Alps’ (1911) and ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’ (1913), which are representative of these modern debates. I argue that the exclusion of photography from Simmel’s essays does not prevent us from a cultural reading, clarifying both that exclusion and the possibility of relating stereoscopic images to the pictorial challenges of the time. This is to state that visuality, although moulded by institutions and power, also spreads across many different social fields. I take as an example the alpine stereo photographs by the Portuguese amateur Manuel Alvarez, a tourist and photographer in the Swiss Alps at the same period of Simmel’s essays.
The development of personal computers, digitalisation, and easier access to the Internet has exerted significant impact on other media, such as press, television, and video games as well. Internet access has enabled multiple players to play together and interact with one another at the same time, regardless of the physical distance in the real world. This digital environment is an interesting field of research not only for game scholars, but also linguists. Methods of communication between players, as designed by game developers, are worth investigating. The following thesis aims to describe and analyse communication systems and mechanics present in multiplayer online video games. The results of the analysis are also used to outline possible means of facilitating communication between players.
Love and Electronic Affection: A Design Primer brings together thought leadership in romance and affection games to explain the past, present, and possible future of affection play in games. The authors apply a combination of game analysis and design experience in affection play for both digital and analog games. The research and recommendations are intersectional in nature, considering how love and affection in games is a product of both player and designer age, race, class, gender, and more. The book combines game studies with game design to offer a foundation for incorporating affection into playable experiences.
The text is organized into two sections. The first section covers the patterns and practice of love and affection in games, explaining the patterns and practice. The second section offers case studies from which designers can learn through example. Love and Electronic Affection: A Design Primer is a resource for exploring how digital relationships are offered and how to convey emotion and depth in a variety of virtual worlds.
This book provides:
• A catalog of existing digital and analog games for which love and affection are a primary or secondary focus.
• A catalog of the uses of affection in games, to add depth and investment in both human-computer and player-to-player engagement.
• Perspective on affection game analyses and design, using case studies that consider the relationship of culture and affection as portrayed in games from large scale studios to single author independent games.
• Analysis and design recommendations for incorporating affection in games beyond romance, toward parental love, affection between friends, and other relationships.
• Analysis of the moral and philosophical considerations for historical and planned development of love and affection in human–computer interaction.
• An intersectionality informed set of scholarly perspectives from the Americas, Eurasia, and Oceania.
The 1903 Delhi durbar was a historically significant event designed to celebrate British sovereignty over India. The durbar’s pageantry re-appeared in the United States in various formats that ignored its original political purpose but adapted its imposed and invented princely traditions. These dissimilar milieus—stereoviews, postcards of Luna Park in Coney Island and circus parades—reached their respective peaks in commodifying orientalist excess for the American public at the start of the twentieth century. The interrelated presentations of durbars embodying foreignness served a symbolic function in a multicultural America grappling with issues of social inclusion. As they re-packaged the extravagance of the durbar’s visuality to provide its appeal as public entertainment, the American versions used the durbar’s characterization of India as the embodiment of the exotic to contrast with the modernity of life in America. This dichotomy was useful in contributing to the cultural dimensions of a collective identity at a critical period of changing American demographics that was swelled by new waves of immigration.
This article focuses on one of the most ground-breaking technological attempts in creating novel immersive media environments for heightened televisual user experiences: 3DTV, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission 6th Framework Information Society Technologies Programme. Based on the theoretical framework outlined by the works of Jonathan Crary and Brian Winston, and on empirical data obtained from author’s fieldwork and laboratory visit notes, as well as discussions with practitioners, the article explores the history of stereoscopic vision and technological progress related with it, and looks for possible reasons of 3DTV’s dramatic commercial failure.
This article explores the use of the stereoscope as a pedagogical medium in the United States from the 1870s to the 1920s as an extension of object teaching, and as a device that asserted a particular visual paradigm on student users. Due to aggressive marketing strategies by firms like Underwood & Underwood and the Keystone View Company, the stereoscope experienced a resurgence of popularity near the end of the nineteenth century, particularly finding application in American schools. This was, in part, because the three-dimensional images that stereographs simulated could be used in the popular nineteenth-century pedagogical method of the object lesson. Analysis of the marketing and pedagogical materials that surrounded the stereograph in the classroom demonstrates the fidelities that its use bore to the methods and objectives of object teaching, and reveals educators’ and social scientists’ efforts to endorse the stereographic image’s properties as realistic to legitimize its work in education. These efforts suggest an ambivalence toward the educational use of a visual medium previously associated primarily with entertainment, and lay bare prevailing attitudes toward work and play in nineteenth-century educational thought. The stereoscope thus extended the reaches of the object lesson, and balanced amusement and instruction. While deployed in order to provide students with more direct sensory impressions, however, the stereoscope functioned as a disciplinary agent, providing highly structured and mediated encounters with the visual world. In this respect, it became a disciplinary tool capable of shaping children’s visual habits and structuring their fields of vision.
