Archiv der Kategorie: lecture

Kompositgesichter

08.02.2017 18.00. Vortrag bei “Briefings”, Institut für Kunstpädagogik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Sophienstraße 1-3.

Kompositgesichter. Eine kurze Geschichte einer unheimlichen fotografischen Technik.

Die Kompositfotografie, die statistische und physiognomische mit evolutionstheoretischen Theorien und mit dem Medium der Fotografie verbindet, wurde im späten neunzehnten Jahrhundert von dem Britischen Wissenschaftler Francis Galton entwickelt. Die Überblendung der Portraits sollte dazu dienen physiognomische Charakteristika und in Beziehung stehende genetische Dispositionen zu visualisieren. Die fotografischen Konstruktionen zeigen diffuse Züge, unheimliche Gesichter, denen jedoch eine große Deutungskraft zugemessen wurde. Trotz ihrer zweifelhaften Konnotationen durch ihre Nutzung in Kriminologie, Visuelles Anthropologie, Rassenforschung und eugenischer Forschung erlebt die Technik in heutigen künstlerischen Positionen eine Renaissance.

Portrait of a Type…

“Portrait of a Type, Type of Portrait: Composite Portraiture between Science and Art.” Raul Gschrey (Gießen, Frankfurt)

Abstact of my presentation at the conference „Doing Face“ at Goethe University Frankfurt, October 2016.

The photographic technique of composite portraiture superimposes facial views of different people in order to create a collective portrait. The frontal views of the surreal blurry figures usually look straight at the viewer and create an uncanny feeling of familiarity. In contemporary arts and popular culture we encounter a variety of these facial compositions that are predominantly digitally produced. But the origins of the technique lie in late nineteenth-century, when the relatively new medium of photography became established as a scientific tool. Presupposing the alignment of outer appearance with inner dispositions, Francis Galton, who is better known as the founder of eugenics, developed composite portraiture as an analytical technique to visualise typical appearances of groups of people. The photographic superimpositions sought to give a face to phenomena such as criminality, physical and psychological illnesses, race, but also to more positively connoted notions such as health, likeness and family resemblance. The technique enjoyed a considerable popularity in positivist scientific circles of criminology, medicine and psychiatry, anthropology, racial science and eugenics that only abated in early twentieth century. Apart from a small number of examples, the technique fell into disuse and only resurfaced in the 1980’s at the eve of another visual revolution, when media artist Nancy Burson took up composite portraiture and developed techniques of digital facial morphing. In recent years artists have questioned the explanatory value of the visual constructions, they have translated the technique into moving images and explored their potential in times of an omnipresence of self-portrayal and identification in social networks.

The paper will try to make sense of the special type of portrait and examine the nature of the visual constructions between their functions as averaging, as well as typifying devices. How was the founder of composite portraiture “doing face” and staging the “face as event” and which central impulses, preconceptions, and discourses formed the technique’s utilisation in nineteenth-century? This historical perspective will be expanded with late twentieth and early twenty-first-century artistic positions that explore the technique in times of interconnected digital media and computerised facial recognition.

Doing Face

Eine Tagung an der Goethe-Universität nimmt unter dem Titel „Doing Face: Gesicht als Ereignis“ die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen der Gesichtlichkeit in den Fokus. Veranstalter sind das Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften Frankfurt und das Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin.

Das Gesicht ist die Visitenkarte des Menschen, sein Aussehen prägt den wichtigen ersten Eindruck. Das Gesicht ist die Bühne, auf der sich unsere echten Emotionen abspielen, auf der wir uns aber auch ganz bewusst inszenieren können. Auf der Theaterbühne spielt es denn auch seit jeher eine große Rolle. Die Bedeutung der „Gesichtlichkeit“ wächst jedoch noch im Zeitalter der digitalen Medien, Fachleute sprechen von der „fazialen Gesellschaft“. Eine Tagung an der Goethe-Universität nimmt unter dem Titel „Doing Face: Gesicht als Ereignis“ die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen des Themas in den Fokus. Veranstalter sind das Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften Frankfurt und das Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin.

Kunstgeschichte, Medienwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaften – die Konferenz bringt Vertreter verschiedener Disziplinen zusammen und bezieht auch Erkenntnisse aus anderen Wissenschaften wie der Biologie und der Psychologie mit ein. Zudem werden Bilder des weißrussischen Künstlers Maxim Wakultschik gezeigt, der sich in seinen fotografischen Arbeiten mit der Produktivität des Gesichts in der Gegenwartskultur auseinandersetzt.

Programm Doing Face weiterlesen

Addressing each and every one

Workshop: Addressing each and every one: Popularisation/populism through the visual arts

April 21 and 22 2016, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Main Building (Ludwigstrasse 23), 3th floor, Seminar-Raum

The workshop brings together scholars from art history, film studies, theatre studies, political theory, sociology and philosophy of religion from several European countries. It discusses the ways (iconic figurations, aesthetic styles, rhetoric figures etc.) through which visual culture addresses its audience and gets involved in the constitution of a public sphere. It is in particular interested in how the visual arts – understood as both visual popular culture as well as fine arts – becomes involved in popularisation practices and populist criticism.

The workshop approaches this subject by focusing on the central iconic figure that these practices bring into play: the “everybody” (which stands for “all of us”, but is at the same time also a “nobody”, a “common man”, a “common woman” and sometimes even a “new man” or a “new woman”). It presents spotlights of a genealogy and an iconography of the everybody and discusses political and philosophical theories about how the mediating force of this iconic figuration can be understood and valuated. In doing so, the workshop pays particular attention to the ambivalent role this figure plays, especially in most recent history, in triggering both desire and enthusiasm as well as resentment and hate.

Programme below Addressing each and every one weiterlesen

Visualizing “Law’s Pluralities”: Artistic Practice and Legal Culture

Interactive lecture by Raul Gschrey (Frankfurt and Giessen, GCSC, artist and curator) in the context of Prof. Greta Olson’s lecture series „Cultural Approaches to Law and US American Legal Culture”

15.06.2015 16.00 ct  – Liebig University Giessen, Phil I, A4

The interactive lecture series “Cultural Approaches to Law and US American Legal Culture” invites its participants to understand law not as an independent body of rules but as inseparable from culture, narrative, images, and political economy. The particular focus of the individual lectures will be on US American legal culture(s). Guest lectures by scholars in cultural legal studies, political science, anthropology, and US American history will enable participants to examine law from several perspectives.

Ambiguities & Asymmetries

“Ambiguities & Asymmetries”, Review of the SSN Conference, Barcelona, 2014

The bi-annual conference of the Surveillance Studies Network 2014 takes place in the centre of Barcelona, on the campus of the University of Barcelona and the adjoining cultural institution CCCB. This year’s conference’s topic opens the floor to discussions of “Asymmetries and Ambiguities” in Surveillance Studies. The attention for the conference is unusual, not only in academia, as it becomes obvious in the comparably large number of 170 participants, but also in exceptional public and media attention. This surely has to do with the revelations of Edward Snowden and the so-called NSA scandal, which have proved true or surpassed the often dismissed observations of the surveillance studies community. Here especially “asymmetries” come to the fore: between an all-encompassing state-run surveillance assemblage, drawing on private sources, on the one side and disempowered individuals on the other.

In the evening panel discussion (videos available online) with Caspar Bowden (a privacy advocate and former Microsoft executive), Katarzyna Szymielewicz (human rights lawyer, Panoptykon Foundation), and Ben Wizner (Snowden’s lawyer) who is participating via video connection, these asymmetries become apparent. Ambiguities & Asymmetries weiterlesen

Ambivalent Faces

“Ambivalent Faces: Visual Endeavours of Identification and Typification from 19th Century Science to Today’s Biometric Recognition.”

Presentation at the 6th international Surveillance & Society conference  (23.04.-26.04.2014) hosted by the University of Barcelona and supported by the Surveillance Studies Network.

When in mid-19th century photography entered science as well as criminological and administrative practice it was widely perceived as an objective medium of depiction and was used as a means for identification as well as typification. Not only in visual anthropology, also in criminology, visual types became influential in the description and classification of the human body and face. Ambivalent Faces weiterlesen

Identifying Identity?

“Identifying Identity? Identification and Typification in 19th Century and the Formation of 21st Century Identities.”

Presentation at the conference “W(h)ither Identity – Positioning the Self and Transforming the Social” at the GCSC, Giessen University.

19th century endeavours of identification and typification, among others by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, have provided the basis for today’s intricate and interconnected collections of data on individuals – their body and face. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of their work widely influenced today’s means and practices of biometric identification as well as contemporary identity formation.

Taking portraits from the early days of photography as a starting point, the paper will examine the genesis of the practices and modes of visual representation and provide an outlook on contemporary digital archives of personal visual data. Here the ambivalent role of the portrait becomes obvious: on the one hand as a sign of voluntary and confident self-representation of for the first time large parts of society in the 19th century, on the other hand as a means of forced external ascription in practices of identification through the mug shot in police work. This technique of recording the criminal face is eventually extended to cover the whole population in IDs and administrative archives. These processes of visual development have gained new momentum through techniques of computerisation and automation in biometric identification that have just in recent years changed the pictures on our passports from smiling half-lateral portrait to frontal expressionless mug shot.

“150 Jahre Kompositfotografie: Zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst“

Auf Einladung des Instituts für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung bin ich mit einem öffentlichen Vortrag “150 Jahre Kompositfotografie: Zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst“ am 20.06.3013 an der Universität Wien zu Gast.

///On 20.06.2013 12.00 I will be giving a public lecture entitled “150 Jahre Kompositfotografie: Zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst“ at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna.