THE FUTURE OF THE IMAGE

Incestuous Images and Impossible Representations

Themes to be developed

Appropriation and Collective Creativity

Originality and Individuality Virtual Worlds Everyday Realities

Part 1: Images

“...the best way to see what is new is to first get a clear idea about what is old.” (Manovich 2007, p.175)

Pixar Animation Studios (2008) Wall.E

Georges Melies (1902) La Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon)

Andrew Ostin (2006) Psytrip

D-b-c (unknown date) Life is Beautiful

Jack Haas

What is an image anyway?

“a representation of the external form of a person or thing in sculpture, painting etc.”

(Oxford Dictionary of English)

“artificial representation that looks like a person or thing”

(Online Etymology Dictionary)

Where are images?

“The Picture is a material object, a thing you can burn or break. An image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction – in memory, in narrative, and in copies and traces in other media.”

(Mitchell 2008, p.16)

What is an image anyway?

From Latin stem Imitari, “to copy, imitate” In the early 14th Century it started to be

also used to describe a reflection in a mirror.

Used in English in the late 14th Century to describe a mental image.

Only commonly used to mean public image since the late 1950s.

(Ibid)

Is this an image?

Drawing of a three-year-old child (Kress and Leeuwen 1998[1996])

“... The different modes of representation are not held discretely, separately, as autonomous domains in the brain, or as autonomous communicational resources in a culture, nor are they deployed discretely, either in representation or in communication; rather, they intermesh and interact at all times.”

(Kress and Leeuwan 1998 [1996], p. 40)

What are images anyway?

Images bare the ‘likeness’ of a person or thing [or idea?].

This ‘likeness’ isn’t necessarily ‘exact’ and may only emphasise some aspects important to the maker, nevertheless being a ‘likeness’ to them.

Images might not necessarily be visual. (Perhaps an image is always a mash up of things... Just a kind-of imageness)

Relating to images... A really, really, brief history...

Plato’s Cave

Aristotle

Biblical prohibition...

Special cases...

Rise of the Artist...

Modern ideas of the image...

Jackson Pollock (1952) Blue Poles number 11. (212.9 cm * 488.9 cm)

“ ‘Image’ ... Refers to two different things. There is the simple relationship that produces the likeness of the original: not necessarily its faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it. And there is the interplay of operations that produce what we call art: or precisely an alteration of resemblance.”

(Ranciere 2007, p. 6)

“This is the sense in which art is made up of images, regardless of whether it is figurative, or whether we recognise the form of identifiable characters and spectacles in it.”

(Ranciere 2007, p.7)

Ranciere’s critique of Barthes’ Mythologies

“Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it History evaporates. It is a kind ideal servant... (Barthes 2000, p. 151)

“...we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.” (Ibid, p.159)

Ranciere’s critique of Barthes’s Camera Lucida

“The second element [Barthes is trying to grasp] will break (or punctuate) the Studium [a kind of general interest in the information a photograph contains]. This time it is not I who seek it out ... This element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation... The Puntum. (Barthes 1993 [1982], Pp 26-7)

“Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age old habit, in mere images of the truth. (Sontag 1979 [1977], p. 3)

“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution ... Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it... Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

(Ibid p.24)

“An image will come at the resurrection.”

Jean Luc Godard

Ranciere’s response:

For Ranciere many claims made about images continue to have religious tendencies. These claims include:

The (postmodernists) claim that there is no longer a reality, but only images.

The notion (like Barthes Punctum) that images (photos) bare the imprint of an actual thing.

That some things are inherently un-representable (like the ideas evoked by an abstract painting)

Distribution of the Sensible For Ranciere, it is the organisation of the

things that we can see, touch, smell, taste (i.e. Things that we sense) that imposes on us the idea of what we can and cannot get from images (where it’s seen, who can produce it, what allows it to make sense). He calls this the distribution of the sensible. Ranciere’s own belief then is that images could have lots of functions, meanings, uses, but that they tend to be predisposed.

Pixar Animation Studios (2008) Wall.E

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What is an image anyway?

Images aren’t specific to a certain medium.

Images are not only visual. Abstract ‘art’ is not free of images. Unrepresentable things are not

naturally unrepresentable. Images are not purely material. Images are not purely immaterial

either.

Images could have many different meanings. However they are heavily connected to particular distribution of the sensible, an organisation of the things we can see , hear, touch etc. Like in the case of our reading of Wall.E, the kind of ‘regimes’ that govern the distribution of the sensible can relate to the way information is organised to tell a story, or in other cases it might be conventions dictating what type of elements are necessary to make something art. This isn’t necessarily unchanging, but it tends to impose limitations on the way things can be understood. In this presentation I have proposed dealing with these issues by making a descriptive reading– something we can do collectively – to accumulate information about how and why images ‘have’ to be a certain way.

Part 1: Images

“...the best way to see what is new is to first get a clear idea about what is old.” (Manovich 2007, p.175)

THE FUTURE OF THE IMAGE

Incestuous Images and Impossible Representations

References and Readings Alberti, L. B. (2004 [1972]) On Painting. Penguin, London. Barthes, R (1993 [1981]) Camera Lucida. London, Vintage. Barthes, R (2000 [1972]) Mythologies. London, Vantage. Besancon, Alain (2000) The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of

Iconoclasm. Chicago Press, London. Boldick, S and Richard Clay (2007) Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested

Terms. Hampshire, Ashgate Publishing. Gombrich, E.H. (1999) The uses of Images: Studies of the Social Function of Art

and Visual Communication. Phaidon Press Limited, London. Kant, Immanuel (1952 [1790]) The Critique of Pure Judgement. Oxford, Oxford

University Press. Kress, G and Theo Van Leeuwan (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual

Design. London, Routledge. Murray, C (ed) (2003) Key Writers on Art. London, Routeledge. Plato (2007) The Republic. London, Penguin. Ranciere, J (2009) The Future of the Image. London, Verso. Ranciere, J (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics. London, Continuum. Sontag, S (1979 [ 1977]) On Photography. Penguin, London. Want, C and Andrzej Klimoski (1999) Introducing Kant. Cambridge, Icon Books. Also see Moodle for writings by Laurence Lessig and Lev Manovich.