Scene as new visual culture. Between urban effervescence, visibility and circulation of digital images
The study of cultural scenes in the early 1990s has rapidly been assimilated to the field of popular music studies, in an attempt to find an alternative to the notions of counter-culture and subculture. The polysemy and plasticity of the term have given way to often disparate efforts at thematizing the sonority or « sound » of a city. Whereas sound does provide rhythm and effervescence to urbanity, doesn’t images also provide, beyond a mere decor, a proper life to, and embodiement of, the city ? This article provides a reflection on the concept of scene from the somewhat neglected angle of the visual culture studies. How does images become performative, and come to stage in forming a cultural overproduction ? How does the circulation of images generate new experiences of sociality ? Taking examples from street art and calligraffiti in Montreal – together with echoes in Paris, Beyruth and Tunis. As an articulation of the local, the translocal and of the virtual, these emergent practices allow us to understand how the circulation and visibility of images can generate new political and cultural codes and stakes, in the new contemporary context of cultural heterogeneity, artistic hybridization and social controversies.