Synopsis
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.
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.
About the Authors
Abraham Geil is Senior Lecturer in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, where he directs the MA Program in Film Studies, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). His research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical theory, aesthetics, and film studies, with a focus on the history of film theory. He is the co-editor of Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). His recent articles can be found in journals such as Novel, Polygraph, World Picture, Paragraph, and Screen, as well as in edited collections on the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Jacques Rancière.
Tomáš Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, where he directs the PhD Program in Film, Television and Theatre Studies. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect theory, and music video studies, his most recent publications include Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021) and How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices (Brill, 2019), co-edited with Ernst van Alphen. In 2015 and 2017, he was awarded a fellowship from The International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM) in Weimar; in 2019, he was Visiting Scholar at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
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