The Genealogy of Images. From Focillon and Warburg to Computer Vision and Contemporary Semiotics
Maria Giulia Dondero
research: Seminar
The Genealogy of Images. From Focillon and Warburg to Computer Vision and Contemporary Semiotics
Maria Giulia Dondero
In this talk I will focus on my current research project (“Towards a Genealogy of Visual Forms: Semiotic and Computer-Assisted Approaches to Large Image Collections”, F.R.S.-FNRS, 2022-2025) on the relation between contemporary approaches in Image Processing and the genealogy of visual forms in art history as conceived of by Aby Warburg (Atlas Mnemosyne, 2012 [1924-1929]) and by Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art, 1992 [1934]).
Firstly, I will briefly recall three ongoing research projects, specifically the Media Visualization project of the Cultural Analytics Lab led by Lev Manovich on visual similarities, the Replica project launched by B. Seguin at the EPFL’s Digital Humanities Lab in Switzerland on migration of motifs, and a recent project held by Leonard Impett on the modelization of gestures in paintings. I’ll try to explain why these projects are unsatisfactory with respect to my project of tracing an innovative genealogy of visual forms. Secondly, I will evaluate how the future of the digital analysis of images may benefit from the ideas underlying the ambitious projects of Warburg and Focillon and from the visual semiotics developed by the structuralist and post-structuralist French School.
Thirdly, I will present my conception of forms and forces in images, with the objective of making continuous bodily gestures analyzable in large collections of paintings and photographs. These propositions are based on a method of image segmentation that finds its roots not only in the French School of Semiotics, especially in the tensive semiotics developed by Jacques Fontanille and Claude Zilberberg (Fontanille and Zilberberg 1998), but also in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on pictorial diagrams (Deleuze 2003), and in the mathematician René Thom’s idea of conflicting forces in painting (Thom 1983). The theoretical basis of this approach is the structuralism and post-structuralism developed in France since the 1960’s and which investigates how meaning is generated by differences and, most recently, by graduated modulations (see “tensive” semiotics, a development of structuralism in the 90’s and 2000’s.)
research: seminar
The Genealogy of Images. From Focillon and Warburg to Computer Vision and Contemporary Semiotics
Maria Giulia Dondero
In this talk I will focus on my current research project (“Towards a Genealogy of Visual Forms: Semiotic and Computer-Assisted Approaches to Large Image Collections”, F.R.S.-FNRS, 2022-2025) on the relation between contemporary approaches in Image Processing and the genealogy of visual forms in art history as conceived of by Aby Warburg (Atlas Mnemosyne, 2012 [1924-1929]) and by Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art, 1992 [1934]).
Firstly, I will briefly recall three ongoing research projects, specifically the Media Visualization project of the Cultural Analytics Lab led by Lev Manovich on visual similarities, the Replica project launched by B. Seguin at the EPFL’s Digital Humanities Lab in Switzerland on migration of motifs, and a recent project held by Leonard Impett on the modelization of gestures in paintings. I’ll try to explain why these projects are unsatisfactory with respect to my project of tracing an innovative genealogy of visual forms. Secondly, I will evaluate how the future of the digital analysis of images may benefit from the ideas underlying the ambitious projects of Warburg and Focillon and from the visual semiotics developed by the structuralist and post-structuralist French School.
Thirdly, I will present my conception of forms and forces in images, with the objective of making continuous bodily gestures analyzable in large collections of paintings and photographs. These propositions are based on a method of image segmentation that finds its roots not only in the French School of Semiotics, especially in the tensive semiotics developed by Jacques Fontanille and Claude Zilberberg (Fontanille and Zilberberg 1998), but also in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on pictorial diagrams (Deleuze 2003), and in the mathematician René Thom’s idea of conflicting forces in painting (Thom 1983). The theoretical basis of this approach is the structuralism and post-structuralism developed in France since the 1960’s and which investigates how meaning is generated by differences and, most recently, by graduated modulations (see “tensive” semiotics, a development of structuralism in the 90’s and 2000’s.)