How Images Appear – Ontological and Epistemological Concerns
Krešimir Purgar
research: Seminar
How Images Appear – Ontological and Epistemological Concerns
Krešimir Purgar
The discussion on the modalities of pictorial appearing is a fundamental prerequisite for the perception not only of images in general, but also for the possibility of aesthetic perception. These are both visual phenomena that have an interior logic different from that of reality (or the continuum of reality) in which they are located as objects of perception. These modalities have to be precisely defined, for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, because they can throw a new light on the still unresolved aporias of the pictorial turn, primarily that part of it that deals with the issue of the supremacy of the visual over the textual and vice versa; and secondly, because unprecedented advances in the technologies of virtuality face the pictorial mediality with completely new challenges. The question that arises is, how can a person’s capacity for the artistic transcending of reality be preserved when the experiences of pictorial representation – traditional painting and cinematography in the “old fashioned” 2D technique, for example – vanish in the digital worlds of virtuality, in which transcendence is actually no longer possible? If art in the pre-digital era was the only means through which it was possible to transgress the borders of cognition/perception and comprehend reality outside the framework of mere necessity, then the virtual space of some immersive reality makes pictorial representation today equally obsolete. Without any remorse or grieving over this radically new situation, this presentation will try to summarize how our sense of sight comes in interaction with the inherent characteristics of different types of images and how the ensuing types of pictorial cognition create the specific nexus ontology-epistemology, a key characteristic of image communication.
Biography
Krešimir Purgar
Krešimir Purgar is Associate Professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek and director of the MA study programe Visual Studies, Art Criticism and Theory. He participated in about forty scholarly and professional symposia, for example in Genoa, Colorado Springs, Taormina, Rome, Florence, Manchester, Skopje, Dartmouth College, at the University of Western Ontario, as well as at the University of Chicago. He has given invited talks at the universities of Palermo, Cagliari, Genoa, Tirana, Prague, Mostar and Krakow. Among his most recent books are The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan (2021), The Iconology of Abstraction. Non-figurative Images and the Modern World (ed.), Routledge (2020); Iconologia e cultura visuale. W.J.T. Mitchell, storia e metodo dei visual studies, Carocci (2019); Pictorial Appearing. Image Theory After Representation, Transcript (2019); W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory. Living Pictures (ed.), Routledge (2017), Theorizing Images (co-ed.), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016). Forthcoming is a university textbook Studiare le immagini – Teorie, concetti, metodi (co-ed.), Carocci (2022).
research: seminar
How Images Appear – Ontological and Epistemological Concerns
Krešimir Purgar
The discussion on the modalities of pictorial appearing is a fundamental prerequisite for the perception not only of images in general, but also for the possibility of aesthetic perception. These are both visual phenomena that have an interior logic different from that of reality (or the continuum of reality) in which they are located as objects of perception. These modalities have to be precisely defined, for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, because they can throw a new light on the still unresolved aporias of the pictorial turn, primarily that part of it that deals with the issue of the supremacy of the visual over the textual and vice versa; and secondly, because unprecedented advances in the technologies of virtuality face the pictorial mediality with completely new challenges. The question that arises is, how can a person’s capacity for the artistic transcending of reality be preserved when the experiences of pictorial representation – traditional painting and cinematography in the “old fashioned” 2D technique, for example – vanish in the digital worlds of virtuality, in which transcendence is actually no longer possible? If art in the pre-digital era was the only means through which it was possible to transgress the borders of cognition/perception and comprehend reality outside the framework of mere necessity, then the virtual space of some immersive reality makes pictorial representation today equally obsolete. Without any remorse or grieving over this radically new situation, this presentation will try to summarize how our sense of sight comes in interaction with the inherent characteristics of different types of images and how the ensuing types of pictorial cognition create the specific nexus ontology-epistemology, a key characteristic of image communication.