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Digital Echoes of Analog Authenticity: Wade Guyton’s Paradoxical Embrace of Late Modernist Aesthetics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Freeman
At the height of the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States there emerged a burgeoning market for works of art which conveyed a bucolic agrarian past, particularly in the form of landscape paintings which depicted people living and working in harmony with nature in a poetic and prosperous manner. In reality, the patrons of this art lived and worked in cities, which had been dramatically transformed by factories and industrial zones, and their interest in such imagery was driven by a poignant nostalgia for an imagined bygone era. In the digital age we may be confronting a similar cultural paradox, and one which has produced a powerful nostalgia for the recent analog past. Not surprisingly, contemporary visual artists are among those that have been influential in expressing an emerging nostalgia for an era of pre-digital originality and authenticity. One such artist is the American painter Wade Guyton, who has made his early career out of digitally-generated works that are often concerned with appropriating the analog uniqueness of late modernist aesthetics. In considering the recent works of Wade Guyton as emblematic of the technological transformation of painting in the 21st century, this paper explores the degree to which our digital present is filled with a predictable, and perhaps understandable, nostalgia for the imagined glories of the recent analog past.
Forgotten Knowledge of the Soul View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katherine Ziemke
In this paper, I present an illuminating way of seeing, learning, and knowing the world through the rediscovery of beauty, art, and imagination. The purpose of the work is to explore how aesthetic and imaginal ways of knowing, the forgotten knowledge of the imagination and the soul, might be revived through a connection with the arts. Beauty and imaginal knowledge, knowledge which comes about through introspection and active participation with life, have edged near obsolescence, replaced by rigid external social constructs and often erroneous perceptions. The search for the forgotten knowledge of the soul is undertaken as an exploration through history, philosophy, and literature. Using an ontological textual analysis, I evaluate how active participation promotes engagement in imaginal knowledge, perhaps even providing a channel to it. In a close reading on the subjects of beauty, imagination, and the arts I explore how aesthetic and imaginal ways of knowing might be revived today. A connection between beauty, imagination, the arts, and forgotten imaginal knowledge is substantiated, with particular attention to the critical importance imaginal knowledge plays in the scientific realm. I conclude with a discussion about artists, poets and musicians as change makers for humanity, conduits in the recovery of beauty, historical imagination, and the forgotten knowledge of the soul.
Introducing Arts and Artworks to Children: The Interpictorial Relationship between Original Artworks, Children’s Picturebooks, and Meaning-making View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yaxi Wang
A picturebook is an artistic communication platform that provides children with an aesthetical reading experience (Kiefer, 1995). It involves a combination of both visual and textual signs and provides a satisfying aesthetical experience when all book components are carefully designed in sequence (Sipe and McGuire, 2006). Scholars (e.g., Beckett, 2012; Serafini, 2015; Hoster Cabo, Lobato Suero, and Ruiz Campos, 2018) have observed that picturebook illustrators often quote or re-create the fine arts in their works to enrich the aesthetics of the illustrations and attach multi-level meanings to the visual contexts. They believe that reading illustrations with interpictoriality helps children develop visual literacy and invites them to explore epistemic and aesthetical communities, such as the artworld and culture (Beckett, 2010; Serafini, 2015). Although the aforementioned scholars have focused on the same subject, their interpretations of how picturebooks reference artwork and the features and the aesthetical meanings of this practice are not unified. Additionally, most of their studies focus on picturebooks and their associations with young readers. As a counterpoint, this research also involves, as participants in the study, picturebook illustrators who create and design the books. This research strategy is aimed at providing insights into interpictoriality in picturebooks and children’s aesthetical development of visual understanding from the creator’s perspective. Underpinned by the interpretivist paradigm, this research explores the relationship between children’s picturebooks, the original works of art that the books incorporate, and the meanings interpictorial images could have for children at different levels of aesthetic and literacy development.
The Greek Diasporic Community Theater in Geneva View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katerina Diakoumopoulou
In 1994, the Greek Theater in Geneva was created and over the years has developed into a remarkable theatrical troupe of the diasporic community in Switzerland. The members of the troupe consist of people from different professions, with a common characteristic of their interest in theater and drama. The activity of the troupe has been abundant since its foundation, with the aim of promoting Greek culture and theater, ancient and modern on the one hand, but also the Greek language through works of the international repertoire. The language of the performances is mainly Greek. Since 2017, the French subtitles have enabled a non-Greek-speaking audience to watch the troupe. This study highlights the historical-artistic course of the Greek Theater in Geneva and the interaction of the troupe within the intercultural context of Swiss society.
The Emperor’s New Clothes: From Y2K to Virtual Fashion View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shanshan Wang
The primary purpose of this piece is to examine the cultural speculation of virtual aesthetics. First by examining the historical relationship between technological development and the augmentation of aesthetic movements, this paper offers a critical and ontological response to the aesthetic nature of virtual design to further understand the roots that inspired contemporary aesthetic experience. Following a detailed analysis of the structure of virtual garment design uses by social VR/AR applications and fashion houses as consumer products and artistic forms. This study focuses on the aesthetic logics we inhabit in virtual design to uncover the ubiquitous social and cultural influences that are beyond semiologically palatable.
A Network Analysis of Collaborative Co-authorship in Brazilian Art Research View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucia Werneck, Thiago Sena, Angelo Loula, Joao Queiroz
There are several interpretations of the processes that define “academic collaboration” in many domains, from formal, empirical and computer science, to humanities and digital humanities, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, semiotics and art research. In scientometrics and governance, this theme is approached theoretically, statistically and from a strategic policy perspective. Based on network analysis and graphs, we model the sociotechnical phenomenon of academic collaboration in art research according to different modalities — multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. A quantitative and visual description provided by graph theory and network analysis, and a qualitative outline interviews with the professors and researchers, to understand a real-life collaboration experience both contribute to the observation of academic collaboration/co-authorship. The analysis of co-authorship bonding and the structure of relationship between areas of expertise of each researcher, is based on 340 curricula from the standardized Brazilian Lattes Digital Platform, and form the scope of our mapping, that consists basically in (i) analysis of co-authorship of publications in indexed journals, (ii) identification of patterns of collaboration in articles and description of collaborative statistics, (iii) classification of researchers according to their role in the collaboration network, (iv) evaluation of subnetworks based on field of activity registered by art researchers in their Lattes curricula.
