Precarious Perception: A Rapprochement of Risk & Tangibility in AHCS

SO...

While doing research for my final paper in COMS 655: Media & The Senses, I was careful to keep our theme of "The Tangible" in mind, and actually had a few ideas come to mind regarding the relationship of visibility/tangibility and risk/precarity.

My research for this paper, which seeks to examine themes of risk, trauma, and queer archive in relation to Bareback subcultures, has given me a new appreciation for the role that perception/visibility/the tangible play in structuring conceptions of risk and reward.

Essentially, deciding to take a risk is a decision that emerges out of holding the tangible and the intangible in dialogue with each other. We make a decision based on our very tangible material landscapes, yet we hold our material realities in an abstract conversation with the potential consequences, repercussions, and rewards that making a certain decision might entail.

So, how is risk negotiated within this ethereal conversation between lived reality and imagined future? How to bring the tangible and the intangible together in an imagined laboratory, within which we perpetually concoct what we believe are "rational decisions" that both take into account our immediate material realities, as well as the not-so-immediate future-reality which waits for us to decide and act before it can emerge.

It seems that by considering the ways in which our immediate, affective, material realities structure our abstract hopes, intentions, and incentives, we are able to locate the nexus of possibility within the amalgam of the tangible and the intangible. By thinking about the ways in which risk is represented and communicated, we can easily incorporate Art History and Communication Studies. That is, we can consider the ways risk is communicated or represented within visual culture, popular culture, television, film, music, literature, public discourse, and society as such, and through these various media consider the ways in which the intangibility of risk is translated into the tangibility of media and materiality.


Okay--so, that was just a ton of brainstorming, and maybe be useless, or may be incredible profound. In any case, I hope this helps, and I think that--if you guys like these ideas--Tim Dean (Unlimited Intimacy) might be an incredible presenter, and he teaches at SUNY Buffalo, so it's not far at all.

So, let me know what you think! Love y'all and be good!

- Justin Wayne Lutz