Visual Perceptions
Featured Humanscape in Geopoetics: Visual Diagnosis of Reclaimed Landscapes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yue Hu
This practice-based artistic research employs diagnostic methods of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)- “Watching, Listening, Asking, and Feeling”- to represent artificially manufactured landscapes. By applying multi-sensory perspectives of “seeing” , this project creates a new terminology ‘Humanscape’ and tries to represent it through photographic language with my “earth writing” experiences inspired by geopoetics studies. Rather than asserting the lands are “sick”, it illuminates how nature and ‘Humanscape’ permeate and disrupt each other, exploring the potential openness of the habitable land and wilderness. The whole exploration is rooted in my intimate and intuitive walks in reclaimed landscapes from the sea in my homecity in China. The artworks focus on the tensioned boundary and dynamic balance between ‘Humanscape’ and deserts, mountains, and sea. Through intervening in humanly regulated environments, this project depicts landscapes with aerial photography and collage, electron scanning, moving images, cyanotype prints, and sounds. Replying to the open call, this project experiments with innovative methodological framework and the terminology in depicting and representing specific landscapes I encountered in the contemporary society. My personal walking and human gaze into the landscape examine how individual experiences orient photographic practice for me as a wanderer, researcher, and artist. By using a variety of images, I also approach and investigate boundaries of visual language in deciphering the landscape visually, verbally, and even emotionally.
Withholding 'Us' - Images in/as the Space of Appearance: Rescuing the Ghosts of the Democratic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brigid Mc Leer
This paper presents research conducted through visual practice and scholarship, that explores how images can act and be participated in politically becoming catalysts for new forms of political appearance, or what Hannah Arendt would describe as a ‘space of appearance’. (Arendt, H. 1998) While Arendtian ‘appearance’ is brought about through people acting and speaking together in public, this research explores what agency images can have in, or as, this space. I do this by bringing together as a ‘knowledge-montage’ (with refernce to Didi-Huberman on Aby Warburg) a diverse but very specific combination of historic images and newly produced photographs; namely Paul Fusco’s photographs of Robert Kennedy’s funeral train (1968), Gustave Courbet’s 1848 painting ‘The Burial at Ornans’ and new photographs that I shot on Regent Street in London. I discuss how in all these images can be found the ghosts of the ‘demos’ (the People) or the democratic, manifesting as a ‘space of appearance’ that is increasingly in jeopardy. By bringing the images together in this knowledge-montage and thereby approaching them as critical catalysts from the past that can enable a new reflection on the present, these ghosts are rescued to become surviving images through which the urgency to recuperate genuine democratic appearance is made manifest. The study includes visual examples from the images under discussion and clips from the video work that comprises the final ‘knowledge-montage’.
@tlas Denkraum: Providing Space for Thought. Making Images to Work.
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lanoix Carole
@tlas is a web application that allows us to question visual production by creating a space for reflection between images. Conceived as a workshop of potential spaces for thought, this Denkraum – to use the term coined by the art historian, founder of iconography, Aby Warburg – draws an unequivocal parallel with the KBW library in Hamburg, which was used to create his famous Mnemosyne atlas (1918-29). The Denkraum refers to the mental space between us and the world. The very site of interpretive investigation that enables us to resolve epistemological problems as much as migration questions or any other visual knowledge lesson. The @tlas performative device is based on a skillful montage of compositions and decompositions, so that elective affinities are affirmed through iterations and circulations in the space of interactive boards offered by the online atlas. These experiments is born of a process as much reflective as intuitive. Involving visual perception, it becomes a true heuristic tool for thinking with images as well as generating several images of thought.
