From the Editor

Welcome to Afterimage Volume 51, number 4. Among a myriad of other topics, this issue includes two distinct through lines: the histories and lingering traces of colonialism and how technology affects individuals’ conception of their place in community. We begin with the essay “Graphical User Interference” by David Caterini, which highlights the latter. In this essay, the author explores digital interfaces, arguing that they are encoded with implicit values that inform users’ behaviors and identities. Caterini notes that intended uses of software create idealized users, but that “artistic appropriation can cultivate nascent desires and subjectivities that question whom such an idealization is serving and that pluralizing the use of GUIs has the potential to shift how users envision themselves as well as their relationship to their communities.”In this issue’s first peer-reviewed article, “Immersion into the Datascape: Ryoji Ikeda’s Data Composition in Screen-Centric Audiovisual Installation and Its Embodied Experience,” Joo Yun Lee writes that by “refining his conception of data as the information units of sound, light, and matter, Ikeda’s work not only quantifies, computes, and visualizes but also spatializes and materializes data to conjure the viewer’s spatiotemporal immersion into the datascapes.” Focusing on Ikeda’s 2011 exhibition the transfinite, Lee employs methodologies from contemporary art history, media archaeology and aesthetics, film and media studies, sound studies, and data studies to track Ikeda’s history of using digital microsound that reveals unexplored dimensions of the digital, and argues that “we are already immersed in data production that shapes the layers of our social, political, and technological realities, whether we recognize it or not.”Catherine Lau, in the article “Sickly Sweet: The Scent of Racialized Sexuality in Arnold Genthe’s Old Chinatown Photographs (1896–1906),” takes a paradoxical approach to the visual in an effort “to unsettle national ideals of contained citizenship by crafting a narrative about transgressive scents in the atmosphere.” Lau explores the “atmospheric racial matter” present in the “hazy” scenes captured by Genthe, a German immigrant who photographed people on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting Hsuan Hsu’s concept of atmo-orientalism to what she calls “atmo-speculation,” and by providing a reading of the fetish grounded in the olfactory, Lau exploits “the national unease about racial mixing at the time through telling a story about unruly matter” and how the “sickly sweet smells of Chinatown’s streets ruptured national ideals of bodily enclosure and immunity.”Three reviews expand on recent productions in the media arts. First, Helena Shaskevich covers Japanese filmmaker Takahiko Iimura’s recent exhibition (and the space’s final show) at Philadelphia Art Alliance, providing a historical grounding and noting that the artist’s exploration of film as a spatial art form exposes “the ways in which the tensions that characterized postwar atomic anxieties scaled from the banality of everyday experiences to geopolitical relations.” Reviewer Valeria or guides readers through the text-image works in the exhibition Sky Hopinka: Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns, recently on view in New York City. Focusing on elements of conversation, representation, attention, and time that make up the show’s array of multidisciplinary works, or writes that viewers had to “suspend their assumptions about colonial notions of attention and viewing” when experiencing this work that “[rejects] modernist speed as well as modernist and positivist representational heuristics.” Tate Shaw does a deep dive into Catherine Lord’s new book The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, which uses the structure of the commonplace books of medical officer Dr. Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls from his time in Dominica when it was a colony of the British Empire. Nicholls filled ledgers with quotations and thoughts stemming from his reading and research; Lord appropriates these headings but fills her tome with her own commentary, and as Shaw writes, ultimately “critically tear[s] into the colonial patronage with her own wide research and willingness to devour it.”Lastly, this issue includes our latest dossier, focusing on contemporary Black Brazilian cinema. Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson and André Keiji Kunigami edited this collection and in their introduction provide an overview of the symposium held at the University of California, Irvine, in the spring of 2022 from which the dossier grew. The dossier includes a transcript of conversations with several Brazilian filmmakers who participated in the symposium, as well as a new essay by Kênia Freitas. As Johnson and Kunigami write, this dossier is a document of challenging times and of “the potentiality of being together and making community, which…is at the core of the ethics and poetics of Black Brazilian filmmaking” and in the closing essay, Freitas highlights how “the flourishing and effervescence of what is being called Black Brazilian cinema involves questioning what it would mean for a film to be classified as such.” * * *We are pleased to announce that our next edition, to be published in March 2025 (as Volume 52, number 1), will be a special issue on the “Aesthetic of Perplexity.” It is being guest edited by Katherine Guinness and Nina Peterson. * * *We continue to welcome submissions of scholarly articles intended for peer review, as well as reports on events and happenings (in person and virtual); interviews with artists, curators, writers, and theorists; essays and photo essays; and exhibition, book, film, video, event, and project reviews. We cover photography, film and video, new media, book arts, and related disciplines. As noted above and exemplified in this issue, we regularly publish dossiers and occasionally produce guest-edited issues. You can visit “Submit” on our website for more information or inquire directly about guidelines.We at Afterimage wish you a peaceful new year.