Nina Kivinen

My main research interest lies in visual practices of organizations, particularly as these are played on their webpages. In early internet research, the virtual life online was often juxtaposed with an assumedly more real life offline. Today, as the internet has become a mundane part of our lives, the online practices of organizations might also receive less of our attention. Still, the very fact of this mundaneity points to the fact that the way companies perform themselves in a virtual space, arguably the space where they are most likely to be viewed, presents a challenge for trying to understand contemporary corporate identity.

The technical development of websites has been swift, and new visual tools are continuously explored and integrated into websites. In this presentation I will focus on three different visual online practices — photographs, dramatized documentaries and historic commercials — and the way in which these create performances of corporate presence in a space where tangibility and materiality is largely absent. This could thus be connected to the issue of the dematerialization or dispersion of the corporate world, and the ways in which corporations attempt to connect themselves more closely to stakeholders in a liquid modernity. Through these stills and moving pictures notions such as “authentic”, “genuine” and “real” become interesting.

I argue that the organization is performed through these images, organizations that are fragmented yet stable, dislocated yet firmly placed.