Powerful Elements
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre) Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
Image and Body: Critical Analysis of the Art Work of Brazilian Artist Juliana Notari View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lilian Soares
The present research intends to make a critical analysis about the photographic language in the work of the Brazilian artist Juliana Notari and the performative character of the image as a propellant of experiences. The artist is known for her video art, performance and photography works, which address, with a biographical-confessional character, discussions on violence, desire and trauma. It is proposed to present some authorial works by the artist that raise debates about the representation of the female body and its signs. Notari's performative action in confluence with the use of photographic images confronts a border between representation and presentation where the body is the protagonist of poetic provocations. In her work, the image acts, at times, as a relic of the action and at times as an indication of an absent body. For this discussion, authors such as Andreas Muller-Pohle with his debate on the production strategies of contemporary photography; Viviane Matesco and her studies on performance and photography; Jacques Ranciere with his notes on the "effect of reality" and fiction; and gender debate of Judith Butler are important foundations for these critical studies of Juliana Notari`s art.
On Negative Space: Photo, Performance, and Phenomenology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Wilder
This paper explores the ontology of photography as through its traditionally representational nature, it stands in opposition to that of performance art, which is often nonrepresentational. The paper explores ways in which the arts, through abstraction and the somatic may disrupt subject/object and signifier/signified binaries. Concepts such as aura and totality are related to both the photograph and performance to dissect the decompositional qualities of the arts. Here, absence and decontextualization are specifically highlighted as they are bearers of aura and a form of displacement that instills abstraction. All in all, the photograph is pushed past its existence as an image. Instead, the photograph is reconstructed to be considered an event. In this, the photo encompasses the entirety of an image's creation and subsequent decomposition. The subject/object binary is distorted as all entities involved in the photographic event are sovereign. Furthermore, the photograph becomes more greatly absurd as it no longer signifies anything. Instead, the photograph exists as a continuation of itself. Here the abstracted image carries more aura in the absence of meaning, evades the anti-feeling hermeneutics of representation, and democratizes the image through the shared sovereignty of all entities involved.
Tantric Urbanism: Piercing the Pictures We Inhabit View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pieterjan Ginckels
Architects are surface makers. Images are our products, inhabit our mental universes, represent our theoretical landscape. The rendered image, a catch-all term for computer images, virtual models, collages and other prefigurations, is architecture’s bottom-line product, and it is a slim, thin piece of paradox: we are ever better at creating these images, but in a visually overloaded world seem ever more easily fooled by the promises that such images entail. The result is a ‘TANTRIC URBANISM,’ an effortless implosion of interior, building and city, as planned, narrated and hyped by media, developers, architects and its users. These images of our interiors, buildings and hoods shine so brightly that their realized versions always disappoint. We excel in consuming the rendered reality in such a way that the places in which we live seem only remnants of a lesser reality. When we collide with the limits of this delusion, face to face with drywall and concrete, we ask the question: is the realized render more real than its unrealized counterpart? Did our two-dimensional dreams really wash away our three-dimensional needs? Have we rendered or are we being rendered? In this tantric study, our built environment is rediscovered as a realized rendering, and I present the tools developed in action research via performance and teaching projects that enable us to scratch or pierce that materialized, rendered surface.
Analyzing Images of Kinky Sex Lives in Exploitation Cinema View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kylo-Patrick Hart
For many individuals, because kinky sexual activities remain relatively unexplored territory in their everyday lives, mediated images can contribute substantially to their perceptions of such activities and the various individuals who willingly participate in them. Accordingly, this paper analyzes cinematic images of kinky sex lives in influential offerings of exploitation cinema pertaining to gay men who participate in the New York City’s S&M subculture as well as consenting adults who engage regularly in the phenomena of fat fetishism and feederism. In doing so, it explores the power of such images in depicting atypical lifestyles and ways of being to (primarily) mainstream audience members and their contributions to the social construction of the kinky phenomena they represent, leading to the conclusion that their imagery ultimately serves to give those who choose to engage in such activities a bad name while simultaneously suggesting that they must either be contained or eradicated in a civilized society.
