Probing Relationships
Semantics of Emptiness in Artistic Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elizaveta Ivanova
The category of emptiness is a paradoxical phenomenon of artistic culture in the postmodern era. It is seen as the absolute, total deconstruction of the image, as a way to go beyond the image, to immateriality. Postmodern artists have created new visual codes and ways of representing meaning, conveying global changes in the era of technological reproducibility and cultural appropriation. The external characteristics of an object are no longer the way to characterise a work of art, even in visual arts. Instead, the conceptual basis, the atmosphere surrounding the work and the aesthetic experience are the main factors. My work contributes to intercultural aesthetics, as well as to Postmodern and Metamodern studies. The analysis is based on a textual analysis of key postmodern texts and a critical reappraisal of leading artworks of the period. Postmodern artists showed attention to the emptiness and the immaterial because of the desire to occupy a religious function. The absence of this function characterizes the era of the death of grand narratives and the end of world wars. Thus, in the era of deformation of cultural foundations, with all the superficiality of postmodernism, paradoxically, many cultural and artistic figures are captivated by emptiness as depth, which is more characteristic of the Modern and Metamodern period, in which an attempt to return to a deep transcendence can be traced.
Resurrecting the Third Dimension: Extracting Historical Landscapes from Aerial Photography
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Jablonski
Using contemporary photogrammetry software, scanned aerial survey images are turned into three dimensional models of vanished landscapes. Showing examples from southern California's 1930's oil boom and the rise of the automotive landscape, the researcher argues that digital twins are not limited to contemporary and future landscapes, but also extend into our 20th century past.
The Camera as Membrane: Opacity in Photography and the Ontology of the Snapshot
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Wilder
As a membrane between the photographer and the photographed, the camera does not document information but creates photographs that are traces and remnants of former relationships. In Azoulay’s Photography The Ontological Question, the hypothetical camera’s agency creates a panopticon. The hypothetical exhibition space and the speculation of an image’s dissemination, for example online, similarly transforms the ontology of photography, specifically power dynamics between the photographer and the photographed. The ready availability of self-publishing has changed the intent of photography, causing the death of the snapshot. The assumption that photographs will be viewed, creates images that are meant to capture. This contradicts values championed by Sontag in Against Interpretation. Images become evil objects creating violent cultures just as Baudrillard explains in Simulacra and Simulation. As Farocki displays in Images of the World and Inscriptions of War, this perpetuates the ontological violence Glissant refers to in For Opacity. This essay steps away from the utility of photography ridding it of its violent power. By emphasizing the event of the photograph rather than the resulting image, photographs are made without the looming gaze of future viewers hungry for aesthetics and information. The photograph as a snapshot regains a certain form of tenderness to say “This is how I relate to you.” Through a study of the images of Sally Mann, Edward Meatyard, Nan Golding, Herve Guibert, Josef Sudek, and my photography, I examine how obscurity and absence within the snapshot make a democratic and nonviolent image that escapes interpretation and ontology.
Egungun, Gelede and Masquerades Linking the Dead and the Living: A Sociological Imagination
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dolapo Adeniji-Neill, Anne Mungai
There is no life without death; there is no death without life. This is the dance that I believe humans have engaged in since the beginning of time. My fascination with the Yoruba approaches to embracing life and death stems from this belief—particularly the idea that the dead are not truly dead. They can be conjured, imagined, dreamt of, and are very much alive across all realms, including the here and now. These ideas align with what C. Wright Mills defined as the sociological imagination: “the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (The Sociological Imagination, 1959). The Yoruba traditions of Egungun, Gelede, and other masquerades embody this connection, linking the dead with the living through socially constructed images and personifications. These practices are deeply rooted not just in individual belief, but in collective cultural consciousness shared by Yoruba communities worldwide. The Yoruba believe that the world was created at Ile-Ife—a sacred origin that further grounds their worldview in a spiritual and communal relationship between life, death, and the cosmos. Egungun, for example, is a masquerade that honors the ancestral spirits and reinforces social and moral values. Through elaborate costumes and ritual performances, the ancestors are called upon to participate in the affairs of the living, offering wisdom, judgment, and protection. Similarly, the Gelede festival celebrates female power, fertility, and spiritual harmony, blending the realms of the visible and invisible in communal celebration.
