Reconfiguring the Portrait
Edited by Abraham Geil, Tomáš Jirsa
- Extends the domain of portraiture to include not just painting, photography, and film but also ethography, literature, music video, social media, digital apps and algorithmic facial recognition
- Includes case studies from France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Canada, and the United States
- Presents ‘the portrait’ as a media-theoretical concept and traces its practices within diverse sets of material, technological, and media networks
- Brings together both internationally renowned and emerging scholars across a range of disciplines, including: media studies, art history, critical theory, science and technology studies, and medical humanities, and animal studies
As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation.
This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media – literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces – the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.
Introduction1. Configurations of Portraiture: Subjectivity, Techniques, Mediality, Abraham Geil and Tomáš Jirsa
Part I. Genealogies2. Operative Portraits, or How Our Faces Became Big Data, Roland Meyer3. ‘This Person Does Not Exist’: From Real Generalization to Algorithmic Abstraction in Photographic Portraiture, Daniël de Zeeuw and Abraham Geil4. The Face as Artifact: Towards an Artifactual Genealogy of the Portrait, Sigrid Weigel
Part II. (Inter)Faces5. When Face Becomes Interface: Music Video and the Portrait of Mediality, Tomáš Jirsa6. Tracing Minor Gestures: Relational Portrait with Fernand Deligny, Elena Vogman7. Lifelike Portraits and ‘Life Itself’: Deepfakes through Gothic Horror, Nicole Morse8. Animal Portraits in Social Media: A Case Study Named Esther, Elisa Aaltola
Part III. Self-Constructions9. The Subject in the Frame: Aesthetic Opacity and the Reverberations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality through the Portrait, Sudeep Dasgupta10. The Avatarisation of the (Self-)Portrait: Notes Towards a Theological Genealogy of the Virtual Self , Andrea Pinotti11. Iiu Susiraja: Self-shooting as Playful Practice, Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg and Susanna Paasonen12. The Quantification Trilogy’s Loss-of-Self Portraits, or Mediating the Technologies of the Self, Kate Rennebohm
Part IV. Afterlives13. As if to Say Nothing: On Balthus’s Portraits, Brian Price14. Speaking, through the Eyes, with the Dead, Georges Didi-Huberman15. Revenants: On the Animation of Dead People’s Portraits in Contemporary Technoculture, Pietro Conte
Index of Names
Some studies of the portrait are portraits of their subject, describing a singular thing in detail. This is not such a book. Geil and Jirsa have instead built a kaleidoscope, encased the portrait in its reflecting surfaces, and allowed their contributors to rotate it into motion, yielding ever-changing views of the portrait as a generative operation—of form, thought, abstraction, time, and media itself.
