Examples of Violent Language

Peace is neither naïve idealism nor utopian fantasy. There are people living in relative peace, with minimal armed conflict, all over the world. Although there is a great deal of direct, structural and cultural violence, most of our planet's eight billion population engage daily in peaceful interactions, trade, communication and cultural exchange.

High levels of social, inner and ecological peace occur in small communities such as the Penan people of Borneo and the Hopi Native American community; in temporary ones such as the 2014 Bentley blockade against coal seam gas in northern New South Wales, Australia; in entire countries such as Iceland, regarded as the world's most peaceful nation; and in long-term communities such as pacifist religious groups of Jains, Quakers, Bruderhof and Mennonites. The latter groups often engage in brave actions such as being conscientious objectors in times of war, although you will also find some forms of violence in many of these communities, such as the structural violence of patriarchy. Some peace communities never engage in war; others only engage in acts of war outside the boundaries of their community.

Peace systems, involving communities with peace deeply embedded in their cultures, policies and practices, can occur on a large scale, although they are rarely recognised or celebrated as such. The five Nordic nations, for example, have not warred with each other for more than two centuries. Similarly, the creation of the European Union (EU) has led to 446 million people across 27 countries now living without war in their region. This shows that, even though creating peace systems has many challenges, new and major initiatives are possible:

Similar ideas continue to be put forward. For example, in October 2023, the prime minister of Fiji was reported as advocating a zone of peace to de-escalate tensions between the United States and China and to set an example to other countries and regions.

Peace is also a process rather than a static state of affairs. What we choose to believe and project onto society can lead us to think that the eternal presence of violence is our destiny, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most of us – maybe even arms dealers – want to live in peace and safety. Yet wars continue to rage across the planet. Massacres by military forces or terrorists, school shootings, women raped and murdered by men, knife attacks –every day a new atrocity blares from the radio or across huge screens ingyms, railways stations and homes, causing widespread anxiety, despair andfeelings of powerlessness. Is this violence just human nature and inevitable? Should we rely on governments and the United Nations to provide solutions? Or are the causes – and solutions – closer to home, in our cultures, thoughts, words, actions and everyday life?

As a lecturer in Peace Studies at Australia's University of New England, these questions were first brought home to me starkly in 2014 as I was flying to Istanbul, Türkiye, for the International Peace Research Association's 25th global conference. Below, in Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, there were horrendous, ongoing armed conflicts, while all around me on the plane residents of the region were engrossed in films filled with violence. Was there a connection?

In this chapter, we’ll start to examine these questions by looking at what is meant by ‘culture’ and discussing different forms of violence, including ‘cultural violence’, before getting some background to the book and an overview of the topics it will examine. We’ll conclude with an introduction to militarism, peace and cultural peace.

Culture

We often think of culture as something only the wealthy enjoy – expensive objects and performances we find in art galleries and opera houses, things created by talented artistes for a small number of wealthy, ‘high-brow’ people to enjoy. But culture is much broader than that, being the ‘network or totality of attitudes, values and practices of a particular group of human beings’. Everyone has some relationship to culture and some interaction with it. We all consume culture whenever we watch a movie or listen to music. We also contribute to the culture (or sub-cultures) of a society by the clothes and hairstyles we wear, the language we use, how we engage with social media, the things we eat and the interactions between generations, to name but a few areas. Sometimes this is denigrated as ‘popular culture’, but it is culture nonetheless.

There is little doubt that, despite a decline in direct violence reported by authors such as Pinker and Richards (referred to in previous chapters), there is still plenty around, with militarism widely accepted as justifiable and reinforced through violent films, computer games and even fairy tales, and order enforced by the threat of direct violence from the state (e.g. police and jails). In such a context, how do you live and parent nonviolently?

And does it make a difference? We may feel that only people ‘in power’ can make change and resolve the world's problems. But we already make a difference – through what we consume, the pollution we create, the businesses we support – the question is more: ‘What kind of difference do we want to make?’ And some of our behaviours have quite immediate effects, such as on our children. If we shout angrily at them, this has an obvious and immediate effect, whereas a childhood of gentle but firm parenting usually results in well-rounded adults.

Parenting Shapes the World

Robin Grille argues that democracy starts at home, and parenting changes the world:

Grille shows how childhood experiences shape emotional makeup and beliefs, and how scars from repetitive hurts can affect behaviour much later:

Nonviolence author and activist Robert Burrowes holds a similar view: that fear, self-hatred and powerlessness embedded in individuals are the deep psychological imperatives that drive the violence in international systems, and all violence is an outcome of the visible and invisible violence inflicted by adults on children. The manner in which these often-unconscious and deeply suppressed emotions are projected into the world is critical to understanding the many violent behavioural outcomes in our world.

In its most baseline understanding, digital immersive art is artistic work mediated by digital technology. Digital immersive art plays a role in disseminating cultural value. Digitisation facilitates the consumption of art products, often in new ways. In other words, art plus (digital) technology provides novel experiences and new ways of imagining the world. China now wants to ‘tell its stories well’. The interface of culture and technology has changed the production, consumption and speed of distribution of Chinese culture. If Chinese art is mediated successfully, this may potentially change the image of China globally. Digital immersive art thus provides an exemplary example. In this chapter, I offer an interdisciplinary approach to critique the intersection of digital technology and art.

In the first three sections, I focus on definitions of digital immersive art and how digital technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) enhance digital art. Following this, I consider the concept of ‘cultural presence’. I provide two ways of understanding cultural presence. The first refers to how technology can help create the impression that the viewer is immersed in the artwork, in this way allowing the user a unique virtual experience of culture. The second, which I will introduce in this chapter and further discuss in the following chapter is from the viewpoint of the nation and references China's cultural influence outside the People's Republic of China (PRC). I will show how these two kinds of cultural presence are interconnected.

In a philosophical sense, the term ‘presence’ originates from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's (1962) ontology of ‘being’. Cultural presence, thus, reflects the ontology of culture: an individual ‘being’ in a cultural environment. This study argues that VR and AR have the potential to generate a cultural presence in digital immersive art. The use of digital technology, especially VR, can accelerate how artworks connect with the public, and vice versa. Art is a statement in public space. In the present day, the intervention of immersive technology, the internet and art museums are changing the conventional definition of public space for art viewers. On the other hand, VR has helped museums make culture accessible to a mass audience by extending the museum's boundaries to the modern entertainment industry (Carrozzino & Bergamasco, 2010).

War Resisters International defines gender as ‘a social construction of ideas that assign certain roles, attitudes, images and behaviour to us depending on the sex we were assigned to at birth and the gender identity that we and society identify us with’.

What does gender have to do with peace?

The relationships between gender, sexuality, violence and peace are complex. They’re sometimes obvious, such as in war or domestic violence casualty numbers, but often hidden, embedded deeply and even unconsciously in language, conventions, behaviours, thought processes and all the policies and institutions that arise from these. Women have long struggled to emerge from the gendered restrictions and oppressions of patriarchal societies.

In Japan, for example, while most women dress more conservatively than in the West, and it's rare to see them in shorts, tights or skimpy tops, a great deal of the culture is highly sexualised, such as manga comic books and graphic novels, video games and related advertising (Figure 9.1 ). That said, there are some strong female characters in the enchanting Studio Ghibli anime films such as My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Spirited Away (2001), Howl's Moving Castle (2004) and Ponyo (2008).

Tokyo has ‘maid cafés’ where (mainly) men are waited on by servile young women dressed as maids (see Figure 9.2), although their costumes are not as revealing as in the US chain ‘Hooters’. One Japanese pop group, AKB48, consisting of 48 young women sometimes dressed as schoolgirls and who are not allowed to date, is another symptom of the patriarchal infantilising of women that occurs in many countries.

Whether complicit or as an ironic response, one Japanese women's fashion trend is to dress like dolls. There is an entrenched division of labour, and sexism is rife in politics, business and the home, partly for cultural reasons.

Spirituality and culture have long been intertwined, as evidenced by the ancient rock art of Australian Aboriginal people, much of which has deep significance and spiritual meaning for them. Related to spirituality are concepts such as religious beliefs, personal philosophies, and practices aimed at enhancing mental, emotional and physical well-being. All of these have cultural aspects. This chapter will explore spiritual, religious and related practices and examine their relationships with the cultivation of peace.

The mainstream view of peace is that it's something which occurs at the macro, elite level, with governments and the United Nations. But what if those organisations are made up of damaged individuals, as we examined in Chapter 7? If they are people with significant inner turmoil, their attempts to create peace may be severely compromised.

There may be little we can do about pro-war politicians apart from voting them out of power when we get a brief say in politics every few years. But we can work on ourselves to find peace within at a micro level, and aim to work outwards to influence our immediate spheres of influence – our families, partners, spouses, friends and workmates. If enough people do this, we may also create political change at the local council level – in the way that debates occur and how people in decision-making roles interact with each other – which can lead to wider change at state and federal government levels and beyond. If we want our present and future politicians to exhibit values and characteristics such as respect, humility, empathy, compassion, emotional intelligence and the ability to listen, a good starting point is to develop and model them in our own lives. There's a song in the peace movement which says:

In other words, having peace within is essential for creating peaceful cultures. Without inner peace, our actions in the world are likely to be incompatible with peace. We can have great laws, policies and institutions – peace infrastructure – but these are all compromised if most of us are in internal turmoil.

Art has many roles and functions. It is used as a display, adornment and even spectacle (Dissanayake, 2002). It has a non-commercial aspect, notably the gift economy, in which artworks are exchanged without requiring payment. In recent decades in China, art has become a business, and this brings new and different actors into the art world (Berger, 2008). Digital technology has offered opportunities to expand artists’ horizons and reach new audiences. The ‘value’ of digital immersive art, therefore, can be analysed from an economic perspective (i.e. contribution to economic growth) and a cultural perspective (i.e. contribution to aesthetics and the diversification of cultural elements).

In order to explore the implications of digital immersive technology on audiences’ cultural consumption of digital immersive art, I examine the role of different actors (creators, entrepreneurs and curators) in the production, drawing on practitioner interviews. In doing so, this chapter examines the factors motivating practitioners in their creative works, the messages they want to convey to audiences and how practitioners’ intentions influence the effectiveness of digital immersive art in generating cultural meanings. Moreover, according to the interview data, the convergence of art and business in China's creative industries has led to both economic and cultural values. In this regard, I will investigate the collaborations and tensions between the business and art spheres.

The analysis in this chapter mainly draws on in-depth interviews with practitioners, including producers, entrepreneurs, curators and staff members who work in art institutions. I selected examples of digital immersive art to explore in order to contextualise the claims made by interviewees. I analyse the making and use of these works and the motivations of their creators.

The examples include works exhibited in China by teamLab, which is an art collective based in Japan; The Worlds of Splendors (瑰丽) (2019), an immersive art exhibition in Nanjing Deji Art Museum; The Unspeakable Openness of Things (2018) at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing; Maybe it's Time to Refresh the Art World a Little Bit (2019), Wang Xin's solo immersive art exhibition in Hong Kong K11 art space; and Lost in Play: Find the Lost One Hour of Life (2019) at CHAO art centre in Beijing.

As I was writing this book, the 2022 Winter Olympic Games were being held in Beijing. At the event's opening ceremony, digital immersive technology displayed the majesty of Chinese culture, as had been the case at the closing ceremony of the previous event in Korea. China's English-language news service, China Daily, published a series of stories highlighting the achievements. One report was enthusiastic: ‘with the use of many cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI), the ceremony served as a visual feast with fantastic lighting and images’ (Wu, 2022). However, rather than displaying achievements like the aeroplane and highspeed train presented in Beijing 8-Minute Show in 2018, the curators used digital technology to convey an image of a unified, romanticised and ‘green’ China. The digital immersive performance featured naturalistic elements, such as the 24 Solar Terms, Chinese landscape painting and snow. This blending of Chinese iconography was deliberately apolitical, suggesting a more mature use of digital immersive art. At the same time, however, subtle slogans were embedded in the ceremony, such as the ‘Community of Shared Future’ narrative, very familiar to people in China and parts of Asia, including Belt and Road (BRI) nations.

In addition, the official theme of the Games, ‘Together for a Shared Future’, was incorporated into the entire ceremony. The passing of the Chinese national flag was one of the main highlights covered by Chinese media. The flag was passed by hand by 100 Chinese people made up of all ethnic minorities in China, eventually making it to the hands of the flag-raisers. Another example was especially noteworthy: at the end of the ceremony, snowflake-shaped plates, each bearing a participating nation's name, interlocked to form a giant snowflake surrounding the Olympic flame. As China Daily wrote, the formation of the snowflake perfectly articulated the Chinese philosophy of ‘harmony in diversity’ and ‘strength in unity’ (Wu, 2022). The performance featuring the snowflake was reported in the Western media. The Guardian report included the snowflake performance as one of the ‘11 key moments from Beijing 2022 opening ceremony’.

The last chapter raised the question of how an innocent baby can become a killer and even mass murderer. Here we ask what role education plays in whether people are violent or peaceful – whether they become a soldier remotely operating a lethal drone, a fervent terrorist plotting attacks or a dedicated peace advocate working for nonviolent change. Whether they are docile and apathetic, or empowered and assertive. Ignorant and easily led, or well-informed and independent. Passive consumers who acquiesce with violent systems, or active citizens who use nonviolent methods of conflict transformation. In short, how can our education systems (allied with our parenting) ensure more peaceful, engaged societies?

Peace education is understood as a significant, systematic mechanism for peacebuilding, and ultimately building cooperative systems that are a foundation for a united peace citizenship. It has a long history, with Australian Aboriginal systems of education, leadership and organisation stretching back for millennia; these enabled Aboriginal nations such as the Nhunggabarra to thrive peacefully and minimise ecological violence through the development of intricate sustainability strategies over tens of thousands of years.

It also occurs within a long Western philosophical tradition of education theory, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century and including prominent educators such as Germany's Friedrich Froebel; Switzerland's Johann Pestalozzi; Bronson Alcott and John Dewey in the United States; and Italian Maria Montessori. This tradition argues that

Military Influence on Universities

Education occurs within particular cultural milieus, many of which are influenced by militarism and the wealth and influence of the military-industrial-media-entertainment-finance-academia complex. Corporations from this complex have long sought inroads into universities to access the brightest minds and develop research partnerships. These partnerships also give them kudos and legitimise their activities.

Artistic activism is a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally and intellectually, with the audacity and strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change and measurable shifts in power. It creates art that is a form of political or social currency, actively addressing power structures rather than merely representing or describing them.

Why do we need artistic activism? Isn't art a bit of an indulgence when there are so many serious issues that require addressing?

Despite the horrors of ongoing conflicts and wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Africa, there has been some excellent news of late in the world of peacemaking and peacebuilding. After a long campaign involving many diverse people and methods – including artistic activism – nuclear weapons have been declared illegal by the international community.

This is a major breakthrough, as the international community by and large has recognised officially that the use of these weapons constitutes a grave crime against humanity. This is not the end of the campaign, however, but the beginning, as the nuclear-armed nations – the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, supported by their allies such as Australia – continue to oppose the move. Can the arts, humour and creativity play a role in such a serious and important campaign?

Out of step with world opinion, there are now opportunities to put pressure on those countries to comply with the will of the majority of the world, as well as to comply with the international laws and UN agreements which already indicated that such weapons were legally problematic. Now there is a definitive international agreement which will give the majority of the world's countries the leverage to ramp up nuclear disarmament. This will allow sanctions and boycotts, as well as diplomatic pressure and divestment campaigns, such as those emerging from 2024 campus peace/justice protests globally.

However, there needs to be a lot more work in changing worldviews about nuclear weapons at all levels, and in building community groundswells of support for action, because there have been similar previous agreements which haven't yet had much traction, such as the Kellogg–Briand Pact. This was an agreement to outlaw wars of aggression, signed on 27 August 1928, by 15 countries, including Australia, and eventually by most of the established nations on Earth.

While the first modality of cultural presence is digital immersion, the second modality of cultural presence is related to the target audience more broadly and to cultural exports; that is, it pertains to national influence or reputation. In academic literature, the concept of soft power, coined by a US political scientist, Joseph Nye in 1990, is widely used and has recently entered the popular lexicon. Soft power, however, is somewhat problematic, as I will explain below. Yet despite definitional inconsistencies, China seeks to build on its soft power, together with economic and military hard power (Wang, 2008). With increasing global presence in economic and security areas, for instance, massive investment in the Belt and Road Initiative, China is a key player in geopolitics. The political scientist David Shambaugh (2013) argues that China remains a partial power, an idea disputed by many Chinese scholars. China's material presence is however undisputed. The nation has achieved widespread recognition in manufacturing. People in many countries are aware of made-in-China goods. Yet China's cultural reputation has failed to ascend to the global stage and this has been a cause for concern within government circles.

In this chapter, I extend the idea of cultural presence and introduce the concepts of digital soft power and techno-cultural imaginary. I examine imaginaries, both within China and outside China and speculate how digital technology might change orientalist perceptions of China. I then explore the idea of China's new ‘cultural confidence’ within the framework of techno-utopianism. The chapter also explores some of the themes raised in Chapter 2, namely, the cross-fertilisation of culture and technology, and the consumption of art. In order to take a critical look at the function of digital immersive art in institutionalising cultural meanings, the chapter reviews the concept of digital virtual art (Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010) and the political mechanism of art (Groys, 2008). In his book Art Power, the art critic Boris Groys (2008, p. 12) argues that art can be produced and distributed to the public in two ways: as a commodity or political propaganda tool.