Seeing Ourselves
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre): Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
Paradoxes of an Image: A Pictorial or Postsecular Turn? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė
The paper discusses the interaction between religion and art, focusing on contemporary visual theories, especially on the concept of vitality of image, formulated by such authors as David Freedberg, Thomas William Mitchell, and Horst Bredekamp. The paper states that the aspect of immediate fate (in the sense of pathos), which is emphasized in the concept of vitality of image, opens up the possibility to discuss the postsecular approach of the pictorial turn (Mitchell). There is recalled a recent situation in one of the Vilnius (Lithuania) churches, when the original sculpture of St. Virgin Mary, created by Lithuanian artist Ksenija Jaroševaitė, was replaced by the copy of widely circulated sculpture of St. Mary of Lourdes, originally created in 1864 by French sculptor Joseph-Hugues Fabisch, at the request of the churchgoers. In the presentation the latter situation serves as a representative model, revealing the paradoxicality of an image, when the aesthetic judgement is changed by the unreflected recognition of the power of the image. The paper discusses the problem of the ontological status of an image, admitting that the condition of emancipation of the image implicated in the concept of its vitality leads to the condition of the uncanny and questions related to such fundamental controversies as distinctions between creator and image or vitality and artefact.
The Director Who Exists with Images: Metin Erksan Example of Sevmek Zamani View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session H. Hale Künüçen, Nur Yankı Köksal
Director Metin Erksan, who created himself by expressing himself with images, is one of the names who represent the “filmmakers generation” of Turkey. He is also one of the five most important directors who took up cinema as a profession after the “theater period” of Turkey. Another key trait of his is the attention shown to main principles of cinema aesthetics, i.e. light, color, space/set design and picture composotion, thanks to this education in art history. The black and white film, Sevmek Zamanı (Time to Love), produced in 1965, which has a special place in Metin Erksan's filmography and in the history of Turkish cinema, is also a film that stands out in terms of cinematic aesthetics. This study seeks to explain how images represent the director and how he recreates them with the theme of "falling in love with the picture". For this purpose, it is also revealed how the elements of cinema aesthetics function in the creation and design of the image in the movie Sevmek Zamanı. In this study, the psychology of the character who falls in love with a photograph of a woman in the movie Sevmek Zamanı is explained through the mirror-self theory of Jacques Lacan. Finally, this study explains the movie character’s falling in love with the image of a women in a picture and living in his own fantasies through Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Selfie Aesthetics in the Global South: Exploring Production, Propagation, and Consumption of Digitally Enhanced Self-Portraits
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sujith Gopinathan
The paper considers the popularisation of camera and social computing applications that alter the photographic image in a predisposed manner. Beautifying filters have been criticised and appreciated for the body image aesthetics they promote. Critics have been sceptical of the standards of beauty they promote – often pale, fair, clear skin and skinnier physiques. Conversely, users have appreciated the cosmetic alterations that make them look leaner, fairer or blemish free. As cultural products of the global north, they create unique sociocultural interventions in the global south. Most filters exhibit a definite racial affinity where they standardise for the moral and aesthetical frameworks laid down by the North, universalising them. Such standardisations and universalisations in the context of racially incongruent perspectives and algorithms becoming bearers that politics of divide through its codes pose the question of technological mediation of the resultant visual culture where in the self and the image of the self is to be looked at. These mutations and dissonances not only form archives of modified visual culture but also redefine the frameworks of Southern aestheticisms. The complex interplay between the enfranchising and empowering functions of the culture industry and its potential to breed deep ethnic and cultural conflicts alongside mechanisms of construction, normalisation and perpetuation of the concept of beauty, which has been ingrained in the socio-cultural milieu under review, will be explored. The study is ethnographic, exploratory and idiographic in nature. The images are analysed qualitatively, emphasising the thematic background and ideological frameworks.
