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Relations in Aesthetic Space: How Color Enables Market Positioning

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Stoyan V. Sgourev developed a relational approach to color, conceptualizing it as a means of positioning relative to a reference group or style and validating it through a computational method for processing digital images.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 17, 2024

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This video video discusses a study that merges sociological perspectives with art history, particularly focusing on the analysis of color in artistic expressions such as album covers. The author, a sociologist, is motivated to explore how color can serve as a bridge between different fields and how it can impact social identity and cultural dynamics. This video video interest stems from a historical context, particularly referencing the importance of color in Venetian art during the 16th century, where color was integral in establishing both collective and individual identities.

The research specifically examines Norwegian black metal music, which emerged in a stigmatized context characterized by extreme imagery and lyrics. The study involved analyzing over 5,000 album covers from 1989 to 2019 to understand how these colors reflect changing social identities and aesthetic preferences over time. The findings suggest that black metal bands initially adopted more colorful representations to normalize their image in response to societal pressures. However, as the genre gained global recognition, they reverted to darker aesthetics, reaffirming their resistance to mainstream culture while reclaiming authenticity.

Furthermore, the author highlights a relational framework for analyzing the meaning of color based on its social connections and how it influences identity construction in various fields, such as fashion or consumer goods. The study proposes a parsimonious model where creative producers engage in positioning—adapting their aesthetic choices relative to others—and expression—reflecting their internal states through these choices. The author notes that this analysis of color in the context of aesthetic networks not only provides insights into sociological dynamics but also addresses psychological and emotional states relevant to the creators and their audiences. Overall, the research highlights the significance of color as a relational force in creative industries and suggests promising directions for future research in multimodality and aesthetic analysis.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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The motivation for this study originates in my

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professional background.

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Uh, I'm a sociologist by training,

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but I have a longstanding interest in art

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history and aesthetics.

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Uh, and I guess it's natural when situated between fields,

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to try to find common ground, to bridge the gap

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between them, such as by using ideas

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or methods from one field to apply to the other.

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Um, to some extent this is necessary

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to avoid cognitive dissonance.

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Uh, so my intention was

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to approach art history from a sociological perspective,

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such as by thinking of paintings as configurations

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of elements and tracing their evolution over time.

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Um, analyzing how they change

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and how this change is contingent on social

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and cultural processes.

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Um, and for many years,

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this framework remain conceptual in nature,

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but the arrival of computational methods of analysis

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of images that made it possible to quantify the framework,

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and to test arguments about the structure

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of the configuration or its rate of change.

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The methods started diffusing from computer science

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to the social sciences,

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and I realized that what was previously conceptual

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is now in critically testable.

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Uh, this is what motivated my interest in the analysis

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of digital images, such as the covers of music albums

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and with my co-authors, Eric Den

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and Giovanni for Millon we're excited by the possibility

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to understand the social structure of color

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by analyzing album covers.

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Uh, but why color is the central element,

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and the simple answer is that I'm fascinated by color.

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Um, I was intrigued by the color revolution,

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that took place in Venice, Italy in the early 16th century.

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Uh, in contrast to artists in in Rome

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or Florence, Venetian artists attributed primary importance

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to color in the pictorial space.

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Color allowed this artist to create a collective identity

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that differentiated them from artists in Rome or Florence.

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Venice became synonymous with bright vivid colors,

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but color did something else too.

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It provided opportunities for the construction

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of recognizable individual identities

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as Venetian painters became known for the use

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of particular colors allowing

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to differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive market.

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So I had this in as a background in my head

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and was wondering whether I might be able to capture some

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of this dynamics in a project that I was involved in

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on Norwegian black metal.

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I thought that it may be more empirically tractable

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to analyze album covers rather than paintings.

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Color is somewhat paradoxical in nature

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because it is simultaneously highly visible

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and analytically invisible.

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It is fair to say that organizational research generally

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lacks color, but it is not only this field

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that lacks systematic attention to color,

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even in fields in which we might expect studies of color,

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such as the history of art

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color has long remained conspicuously absent.

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Uh, this absence may be largely due

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to the ambivalence of color.

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It is simultaneously an objective physical property

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and a subjective experience as a perception

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dependent on our eyes as receivers.

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So color is characterized by objective physical traits such

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as brightness and saturation, which shape its perception,

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but its meaning is always

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subjective relative to other colors.

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Our perception of color results from the

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interaction with other colors.

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Uh, the dominant approaches to the analysis

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of color in the social sciences are of two kinds.

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The first one is psychologically in nature.

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Um, color has effective force

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and is associated with emotional states.

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Scholars have recognized that the use of color

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manifests individual or collective emotions

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and psychological components of the self.

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Um, color organizes our feelings according

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to specific connotations, such

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as when product designers manipulate color to create a sense

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of personality for brands.

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The second approach is sociological in nature.

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Uh, aesthetic perception depends on constructs such

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as status, identity, or career stage that vary all the time.

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And what sociologists are particularly interested in is

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how perception of color changes all the time as the use

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of color adapts to evolving public tastes

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or to new trends by pursuing proximity to

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or distance from them.

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Um, and I would like here to reference the work

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of the sociologist, Gary Allen, fine

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or cla on the social structure

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and relational configuration of colors,

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all the excellent work of the historian Michelle, pastor.

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Uh, so what we do in our paper is we build on this

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sociological framework

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to propose a testable relational framework where the meaning

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of color emerges from relations with objects, persons,

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or events highlighting its ability

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to make visible identities

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and to connect relevant others into a network.

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And we articulate two types of relations,

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external relations when color serves

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to connect cultural producers

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and internal relations, which are the relations

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between the elements themselves, such as

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connections within the style of a particular producer.

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Existing sociological research on,

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on color is qualitative in nature, while our intention was

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to propose an empirically testable model of the applica

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of the application of color based on principles

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of association with

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or distancing from reference groups inspired

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by the foundational work of the sociologist ziel.

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So this framework is parsimonious in nature and quant

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and quantitative and can be tested

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in very different settings.

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Black metal emerged in Norway's underground heavy metal seen

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around 1990.

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It followed in the footsteps of early heavy metal bands such

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as Black Sabbath that explored the occult in their

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music and lyrics.

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The first wave of black metal took place

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outside Norway in the early 1980s, represented

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by the band's venom, bathy, and merciful fate.

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The second wave was pioneered by a few Norwegian bands such

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as Mayhem, bur Emperor, dark Throne,

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or Immortal, that pushed metal towards harsher sound

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and imagery as an expression of their opposition to

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what they viewed as the commercialization

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of heavy metal at the time.

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Uh, these bands adopted extreme images in lyrics

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that articulated pagan anti-Christian messages.

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A taste for the macabre manifested itself

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in blasphemous lyrics.

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Demonic stage persona

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or the application of corpse paint on faces, members

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of the Norwegian black metal scene went a step further

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in celebrating the forces of evil by committing a series

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of criminal acts from 1991 to 96,

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including church burnings, grave desecration, burglary,

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assault, and even murder.

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Uh, they committed arson attacks in

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around 30 historic wooden churches, leading

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to prison sentences for the perpetrators

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and lasting notoriety for the genre,

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which was heavily stigmatized in Norwegian society in the

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mid 1990s.

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But surprisingly, black metal continued to attract fans

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and to grow worldwide with tens of thousands

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of bands playing this music.

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The genre entered the music mainstream with the success of,

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of bands such as Satcon and de.

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In the early two thousands, band started sending hundreds

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of thousands, even millions of albums,

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and in less than a decade,

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the genre grew from an obscure subculture to the largest

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cultural export of Norway.

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And this is a key reason why we decided

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to study black metal, is we were interested in

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how their aesthetic representation evolved

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with the changing fortunes of the genre.

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The genre is defined it by its predilection

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for the black color associated with dark forces

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and opposition to institutionalized religion.

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It is disassociation with the black color that we use

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to test our model.

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We compiled a, a database

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of 5,125 album covers

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between 1989

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and 2019, analyzing the relations

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between bands playing black metal

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and bands playing other types of heavy metal in Norway,

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which constituted our reference group.

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The results of our models attest

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to a curvy linear dependence black metal bands associated

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with past color choices of non-black metal bands up

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to a point after which they started

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to disassociate from them.

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Uh, so we observe, complex positional gain.

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Black metal bands reproduced aesthetic conventions

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associated with the dominant heavy metal genre,

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but also sought to maintain distance from

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from these conventions.

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This game of compliance

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and distancing is in agreement

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with the basic sociological principles that were formulated

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by kemal in the early 20th century.

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Uh, it is important to underline

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that dispositioning is dynamic, allowing the bans to respond

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to external events.

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We found that black metal bans reacted

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to their stigmatization in Norwegian society in the mid

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1990s by bolstering the appeal of their albums

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and making their covers more colorful.

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The intense social pressure on black metal in the mid 1990s

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encouraged bands to try to normalize their image

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by adding color to the album covers.

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Our analysis reinforces prea evidence showing

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that organizations project a positive image

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to challenge negative evaluations.

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However, as stigmatization, abated

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and black metal started selling on a global scale, the use

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of color increasingly reverted to the black

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and white mode signifying resistance.

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The black color allowed this bands

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to affirm their resistance to the ness of popular culture,

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reclaiming connection to the authenticity

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of the underground period.

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They returned to a darker aesthetic dominated

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by the black color in defiance of the commercialization

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of a formerly underground genre.

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The duality of the black color is fundamental

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by asserting it in a negative way is an

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expression of resistance.

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The bands used it in a positive way

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to construct a relational identity.

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Probably the key contribution

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of our analysis is the explanation of the role

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that color can play in such positional games

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by organizing information exchanges between producers

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and helping identities emerge.

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In addition to more familiar product features such as price,

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design or craftsmanship, through our analysis of color,

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we managed to expose practices of mutual observation,

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how producers position themselves relative

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to those they view as relevant in decisions on the content,

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the pricing, or the design of products.

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This is a relational vision of markets

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that is very much inspired by the sociology of Heisen White.

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Our analysis confirms something that,

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Venetian artists in the 16th century must have felt

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intuitively that color is a powerful means of positioning,

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allowing the projection of an identity based on forces

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of association with and disassociation from others.

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Uh, basic principles of positioning complies similarly

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to 16th century art as to music in the 1990s,

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aesthetic networks are present not only in music

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and art, they can be found in fashion design,

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or consumer goods.

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Cal connects people with workplaces where a complex web

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of affinities and entities is manifested in

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ary choices apart from less visible ways.

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Our analysis reinforces the assumption

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that color is relational in nature,

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connecting people in aesthetic networks.

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For example, the poet gthe

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observed in his famous treatise on the topic in 1810,

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that KA is a relational force that is every movement

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between subject and object.

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This relational of force is on display when people

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or companies make everyday decisions on the palette

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or intensity of colors

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to feature in their clothes or products.

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A choice between bright

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and muted colors signals our identities.

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Now this choice is really independent of the choices

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of those surrounding us, our friends,

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competitors or enemies.

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The choices are also influenced

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by trends in culture and fashion.

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Um, what we managed to do in our analysis is

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to visualize these aesthetic networks,

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but we are also mindful that we're only at the outset

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of the process, and there's quite a lot

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of work remaining in order to understand

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how aesthetic networks emerge

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and the principles by which they evolve.

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Uh, and we believe that a particularly promising direction

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for future research is the degree of alignment between image

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and text, examining the extent

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to which words in narratives complement

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or contradict associated images.

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This is known as multimodality

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and is a fundamental question in the history

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of culture going as far back

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as the illuminated medieval manuscripts.

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In a follow-up paper with my colleagues Don

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and Giovanni Formill, we developed a relational approach

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to multimodality, combining a computational method

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for exploring visual data

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with natural language-based methods

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for processing verbal data.

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And this type of analysis takes,

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takes place in a distinctive research context,

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drawing on the digitized letters

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and paintings of the artist Vincent Van Ho.

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This is one of the most famous cases

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of multi-modality in the history of culture.

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Um, his letters and paintings are complimentary sources

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of insight into his working methods.

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Our analytical objective is to connect the structure

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of the letters and paintings

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through the principle of opposition.

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The visual analysis testifies to the growing role

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of contrast of complementary colors in his paintings.

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While the textual analysis provides consistent evidence

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for increasing effective cognitive

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and behavioral ambivalence, we demonstrate how the use

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of contrast expresses effective cognitive

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and behavioral types of ambivalence.

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The artist developed an innovative visual language

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to express contradictions

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and relational tensions

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to which he was exposed in his personal life.

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This is one example of how the use

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of advanced computational methods

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can provide insights not only into social mechanisms,

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but psychological and emotional states as well.

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An important theoretical implication

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of our analysis is the crystallization

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of a parsimonious relational model of aesthetic space

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where the actions of creative producers can be summarized

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into two complimentary functions,

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positioning and expression.

16:07.085 --> 16:10.605
Positioning is external in nature as producers make use

16:10.605 --> 16:13.885
of a set of aesthetic elements to draw closer to

16:14.065 --> 16:16.125
or further apart from other producers.

16:16.535 --> 16:18.765
While expression is internal in nature,

16:19.015 --> 16:21.605
assembling a configuration of aesthetic elements,

16:21.765 --> 16:25.485
particularly to a creative producer based on a mixture

16:25.485 --> 16:27.285
of emotions, reflections,

16:27.465 --> 16:29.365
and relations to the surrounding world.

16:30.225 --> 16:33.925
And in this logic, any creative enterprise such as painting,

16:34.035 --> 16:38.165
writing, or designing address constitutes a configuration

16:38.165 --> 16:41.245
of elements that reflect emotional states ideas

16:41.505 --> 16:45.685
and social relations, whose meaning is socially constructed

16:46.385 --> 16:49.965
by positioning it externally vis-a-vis other producers.

16:50.745 --> 16:52.605
As the Vangogh case demonstrates,

16:53.245 --> 16:56.925
creative producers simultaneously strive to give expression

16:56.925 --> 17:00.445
to internal states through the use of particular elements,

17:01.105 --> 17:04.525
and position these elements in aesthetic space in a manner

17:04.755 --> 17:08.285
that attracts public attention and facilitates recognition.

17:09.625 --> 17:11.165
The ambivalent nature of color,

17:11.455 --> 17:13.365
which spends subjective properties

17:13.545 --> 17:15.045
and subjective experiences.

17:15.315 --> 17:17.205
Natural and social sciences,

17:18.045 --> 17:21.605
everyday life in corporate boardrooms is a challenge

17:21.605 --> 17:23.005
to our theories and methods,

17:23.665 --> 17:25.965
but it's also a source of exciting opportunities,

17:27.045 --> 17:28.165
calories indispensable

17:28.165 --> 17:30.965
to the functioning ka our image obsessed capitalism.

17:31.585 --> 17:33.765
And it's also a fundamental cultural element

17:33.995 --> 17:38.205
that fortress curious historical connections such as those

17:38.205 --> 17:40.885
between Venetian artists in the 16th century,

17:41.545 --> 17:44.365
the bright colors of Van Gogh in the late 19th century,

17:44.905 --> 17:46.045
and the chilling darkness

17:46.045 --> 17:48.405
of Norwegian black metal in the 1990s.

17:49.175 --> 17:51.685
These aesthetic networks are most intriguing,

17:52.345 --> 17:54.165
and I believe there are many fascinating

17:54.625 --> 17:57.085
and colorful discoveries lying ahead of us.

00:00 - The motivation for this study originates in my professional background. I'm a sociologist by training, but I have a longstanding interest in art history and aesthetics. and I guess it's natural when situated between fields,

00:14 - to try to find common ground, to bridge the gap between them, such as by using ideas or methods from one field to apply to the other. to some extent this is necessary to avoid cognitive dissonance. so my intention was to approach art history from a sociological perspective, such as by thinking of paintings as configurations of elements and tracing their evolution over time. analyzing how they change

00:46 - and how this change is contingent on social and cultural processes. and for many years, this framework remain conceptual in nature, but the arrival of computational methods of analysis of images that made it possible to quantify the framework, and to test arguments about the structure of the configuration or its rate of change. The methods started diffusing from computer science to the social sciences,

01:15 - and I realized that what was previously conceptual is now in critically testable. this is what motivated my interest in the analysis of digital images, such as the covers of music albums and with my co-authors, Eric Den and Giovanni for Millon we're excited by the possibility to understand the social structure of color by analyzing album covers. but why color is the central element, and the simple answer is that I'm fascinated by color.

01:45 - I was intrigued by the color revolution, that took place in Venice, Italy in the early 16th century. in contrast to artists in in Rome or Florence, Venetian artists attributed primary importance to color in the pictorial space. Color allowed this artist to create a collective identity that differentiated them from artists in Rome or Florence. Venice became synonymous with bright vivid colors, but color did something else too. It provided opportunities for the construction

02:20 - of recognizable individual identities as Venetian painters became known for the use of particular colors allowing to differentiate themselves in a crowded competitive market. So I had this in as a background in my head and was wondering whether I might be able to capture some of this dynamics in a project that I was involved in on Norwegian black metal. I thought that it may be more empirically tractable to analyze album covers rather than paintings.

02:52 - Color is somewhat paradoxical in nature because it is simultaneously highly visible and analytically invisible. It is fair to say that organizational research generally lacks color, but it is not only this field that lacks systematic attention to color, even in fields in which we might expect studies of color, such as the history of art color has long remained conspicuously absent. this absence may be largely due

03:22 - to the ambivalence of color. It is simultaneously an objective physical property and a subjective experience as a perception dependent on our eyes as receivers. So color is characterized by objective physical traits such as brightness and saturation, which shape its perception, but its meaning is always subjective relative to other colors. Our perception of color results from the interaction with other colors.

03:52 - the dominant approaches to the analysis of color in the social sciences are of two kinds. The first one is psychologically in nature. color has effective force and is associated with emotional states. Scholars have recognized that the use of color manifests individual or collective emotions and psychological components of the self. color organizes our feelings according to specific connotations, such

04:21 - as when product designers manipulate color to create a sense of personality for brands. The second approach is sociological in nature. aesthetic perception depends on constructs such as status, identity, or career stage that vary all the time. And what sociologists are particularly interested in is how perception of color changes all the time as the use of color adapts to evolving public tastes or to new trends by pursuing proximity to or distance from them.

04:55 - and I would like here to reference the work of the sociologist, Gary Allen, fine or cla on the social structure and relational configuration of colors, all the excellent work of the historian Michelle, pastor. so what we do in our paper is we build on this sociological framework to propose a testable relational framework where the meaning of color emerges from relations with objects, persons, or events highlighting its ability

05:28 - to make visible identities and to connect relevant others into a network. And we articulate two types of relations, external relations when color serves to connect cultural producers and internal relations, which are the relations between the elements themselves, such as connections within the style of a particular producer. Existing sociological research on, on color is qualitative in nature, while our intention was

06:00 - to propose an empirically testable model of the applica of the application of color based on principles of association with or distancing from reference groups inspired by the foundational work of the sociologist ziel. So this framework is parsimonious in nature and quant and quantitative and can be tested in very different settings. Black metal emerged in Norway's underground heavy metal seen around 1990.

06:30 - It followed in the footsteps of early heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath that explored the occult in their music and lyrics. The first wave of black metal took place outside Norway in the early 1980s, represented by the band's venom, bathy, and merciful fate. The second wave was pioneered by a few Norwegian bands such as Mayhem, bur Emperor, dark Throne, or Immortal, that pushed metal towards harsher sound and imagery as an expression of their opposition to

07:03 - what they viewed as the commercialization of heavy metal at the time. these bands adopted extreme images in lyrics that articulated pagan anti-Christian messages. A taste for the macabre manifested itself in blasphemous lyrics. Demonic stage persona or the application of corpse paint on faces, members of the Norwegian black metal scene went a step further in celebrating the forces of evil by committing a series

07:32 - of criminal acts from 1991 to 96, including church burnings, grave desecration, burglary, assault, and even murder. they committed arson attacks in around 30 historic wooden churches, leading to prison sentences for the perpetrators and lasting notoriety for the genre, which was heavily stigmatized in Norwegian society in the mid 1990s. But surprisingly, black metal continued to attract fans

08:00 - and to grow worldwide with tens of thousands of bands playing this music. The genre entered the music mainstream with the success of, of bands such as Satcon and de. In the early two thousands, band started sending hundreds of thousands, even millions of albums, and in less than a decade, the genre grew from an obscure subculture to the largest cultural export of Norway. And this is a key reason why we decided

08:29 - to study black metal, is we were interested in how their aesthetic representation evolved with the changing fortunes of the genre. The genre is defined it by its predilection for the black color associated with dark forces and opposition to institutionalized religion. It is disassociation with the black color that we use to test our model. We compiled a, a database of 5,125 album covers

08:59 - between 1989 and 2019, analyzing the relations between bands playing black metal and bands playing other types of heavy metal in Norway, which constituted our reference group. The results of our models attest to a curvy linear dependence black metal bands associated with past color choices of non-black metal bands up to a point after which they started to disassociate from them.

09:27 - so we observe, complex positional gain. Black metal bands reproduced aesthetic conventions associated with the dominant heavy metal genre, but also sought to maintain distance from from these conventions. This game of compliance and distancing is in agreement with the basic sociological principles that were formulated by kemal in the early 20th century. it is important to underline

09:55 - that dispositioning is dynamic, allowing the bans to respond to external events. We found that black metal bans reacted to their stigmatization in Norwegian society in the mid 1990s by bolstering the appeal of their albums and making their covers more colorful. The intense social pressure on black metal in the mid 1990s encouraged bands to try to normalize their image by adding color to the album covers. Our analysis reinforces prea evidence showing

10:28 - that organizations project a positive image to challenge negative evaluations. However, as stigmatization, abated and black metal started selling on a global scale, the use of color increasingly reverted to the black and white mode signifying resistance. The black color allowed this bands to affirm their resistance to the ness of popular culture, reclaiming connection to the authenticity of the underground period.

10:58 - They returned to a darker aesthetic dominated by the black color in defiance of the commercialization of a formerly underground genre. The duality of the black color is fundamental by asserting it in a negative way is an expression of resistance. The bands used it in a positive way to construct a relational identity. Probably the key contribution of our analysis is the explanation of the role

11:26 - that color can play in such positional games by organizing information exchanges between producers and helping identities emerge. In addition to more familiar product features such as price, design or craftsmanship, through our analysis of color, we managed to expose practices of mutual observation, how producers position themselves relative to those they view as relevant in decisions on the content, the pricing, or the design of products. This is a relational vision of markets

12:02 - that is very much inspired by the sociology of Heisen White. Our analysis confirms something that, Venetian artists in the 16th century must have felt intuitively that color is a powerful means of positioning, allowing the projection of an identity based on forces of association with and disassociation from others. basic principles of positioning complies similarly to 16th century art as to music in the 1990s, aesthetic networks are present not only in music and art, they can be found in fashion design,

12:37 - or consumer goods. Cal connects people with workplaces where a complex web of affinities and entities is manifested in ary choices apart from less visible ways. Our analysis reinforces the assumption that color is relational in nature, connecting people in aesthetic networks. For example, the poet gthe observed in his famous treatise on the topic in 1810, that KA is a relational force that is every movement

13:07 - between subject and object. This relational of force is on display when people or companies make everyday decisions on the palette or intensity of colors to feature in their clothes or products. A choice between bright and muted colors signals our identities. Now this choice is really independent of the choices of those surrounding us, our friends, competitors or enemies.

13:33 - The choices are also influenced by trends in culture and fashion. what we managed to do in our analysis is to visualize these aesthetic networks, but we are also mindful that we're only at the outset of the process, and there's quite a lot of work remaining in order to understand how aesthetic networks emerge and the principles by which they evolve. and we believe that a particularly promising direction

13:59 - for future research is the degree of alignment between image and text, examining the extent to which words in narratives complement or contradict associated images. This is known as multimodality and is a fundamental question in the history of culture going as far back as the illuminated medieval manuscripts. In a follow-up paper with my colleagues Don and Giovanni Formill, we developed a relational approach

14:28 - to multimodality, combining a computational method for exploring visual data with natural language-based methods for processing verbal data. And this type of analysis takes, takes place in a distinctive research context, drawing on the digitized letters and paintings of the artist Vincent Van Ho. This is one of the most famous cases of multi-modality in the history of culture.

14:54 - his letters and paintings are complimentary sources of insight into his working methods. Our analytical objective is to connect the structure of the letters and paintings through the principle of opposition. The visual analysis testifies to the growing role of contrast of complementary colors in his paintings. While the textual analysis provides consistent evidence for increasing effective cognitive and behavioral ambivalence, we demonstrate how the use

15:23 - of contrast expresses effective cognitive and behavioral types of ambivalence. The artist developed an innovative visual language to express contradictions and relational tensions to which he was exposed in his personal life. This is one example of how the use of advanced computational methods can provide insights not only into social mechanisms, but psychological and emotional states as well.

15:50 - An important theoretical implication of our analysis is the crystallization of a parsimonious relational model of aesthetic space where the actions of creative producers can be summarized into two complimentary functions, positioning and expression. Positioning is external in nature as producers make use of a set of aesthetic elements to draw closer to or further apart from other producers. While expression is internal in nature,

16:19 - assembling a configuration of aesthetic elements, particularly to a creative producer based on a mixture of emotions, reflections, and relations to the surrounding world. And in this logic, any creative enterprise such as painting, writing, or designing address constitutes a configuration of elements that reflect emotional states ideas and social relations, whose meaning is socially constructed by positioning it externally vis-a-vis other producers. As the Vangogh case demonstrates,

16:53 - creative producers simultaneously strive to give expression to internal states through the use of particular elements, and position these elements in aesthetic space in a manner that attracts public attention and facilitates recognition. The ambivalent nature of color, which spends subjective properties and subjective experiences. Natural and social sciences, everyday life in corporate boardrooms is a challenge to our theories and methods,

17:23 - but it's also a source of exciting opportunities, calories indispensable to the functioning ka our image obsessed capitalism. And it's also a fundamental cultural element that fortress curious historical connections such as those between Venetian artists in the 16th century, the bright colors of Van Gogh in the late 19th century, and the chilling darkness of Norwegian black metal in the 1990s. These aesthetic networks are most intriguing,

17:52 - and I believe there are many fascinating and colorful discoveries lying ahead of us.

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