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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Philosophy of Photography - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2017
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Hades as an accumulation of tertiary retentions
More LessAbstractThis article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains and re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge.
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Dancer in a laboratory of images: Aby Warburg’s performative didactics
By Uwe FlecknerAbstractThe image plates that Aby Warburg produced during the closing years of his life and his complex use of photographic reproductions were a completely new, experimental medium in art-history research. The essay deals with the visual rhetoric of this medium, with its both polyphonic and multifocal argumentation structure. Warburg’s plates are arranged into compositions whose distinct syntax does not follow any linguistic models and in many of the plates Warburg’s notion of polarity in art history is expressed through utterly conflicting, inversive perspectives on the pictorial material. They document how deeply devoted the art historian was to pictures in which humanity had sought to exorcise inexplicable and hence threatening phenomena, the emotions of the inner and the demons (‘monstra’) of the outer world. The specific impact of his series of pictures and exhibitions shows that Warburg developed a demonstration procedure that was highly performative.
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The technical apparatus of the Warburg Haus: Possible returns from oblivion
By Mick FinchAbstractThis article examines the technical apparatus of the Warburg Haus in Hamburg and its relationship with Aby Warburg’s art historical methodology. A link is made to an exhibition in 1941 by Saxl and Wittkower entitled English Art and the Mediterranean that was published in 1948 and again in 1969 as British Art and the Mediterranean. In turn, the manner in which this exhibition and publication was image led, the text serving to annotate the images, links to broadcast media, namely, Clark’s Civilisation (1969) and Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), as a strong example of a working practice.
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Warburg’s desk
More LessAbstractThe article deals with an object which has hitherto been overlooked, but which was essential to Aby Warburg’s work: the desk. While in a first step sources are collected from and about Warburg, which emphasize the significance of the desk for Warburg’s work, a second step is taken to reconstruct a specific type of desk that was of great importance to Warburg. From the identification of this work table the thesis is derived that this table played a decisive role in the formation of the tableaus of the Mnemosyne Atlas.
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Speculating on the biography of an apparatus
By Anke HennigAbstractIn this article I will look at literary imagination and the ways it is undermined and transformed by its relationship to apparatuses. I will compare the apparatus of Aby Warburg’s library with Peter Dittmer’s recent poetic apparatus Die Amme (1992–2006) in order to find out how poetics gets trapped by, and responds to, the challenge of apparatuses by employing the logistics of writing. A key concern of this article is to determine the role that speculation plays in poetics, in the apparatuses that govern writing, and in the economics of both.
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Mobility on slips. Or: How to invest in paper. The Aby Warburg style
More LessAbstractThe article examines the relationship between Aby Warburg and his library by analysing the media which is involved: first, the arrangement of the books according to the library’s principle of the ‘law of thse good neighbour’, which helps to order the books on the shelves. Second, the handling of the library is even more determined by Aby Warburg’s use of index cards and card indexes. Like his card index which is situated between him and the library, Aby Warburg himself is in between two library paradigms: on the one hand, as a person of the nineteenth century, Warburg belongs to the supporters of the systematic shelving instead of cataloguing the book collection. On the other hand his work is based on swift associations and direct responses to research questions, the associations not only thought up by words, but also visually, manually to be re-arranged on the shelves, which turns out to be a rather clumsy practice. The motor and initiator of these new orders is the card index with its mobile elements, allowing quick connections between the entities and resulting in enormous processes of re-shuffling of whole shelves and systematic arrangements in the book collection. It is especially the combination of these usually incompatible paradigms that makes the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg such a unique institution and rich example of knowledge practices in the twentieth century.
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The tape readers: Financial trading as a visual practice
More LessAbstractSince the early twentieth century, speculators have used visual methods to detect future trends in prices. The resulting visual hermeneutics has become known as ‘technical analysis’. Although it has some mathematical elements, however, its genealogy is much stranger. This essay traces elements of this tradition including its associations with vibrations and cycles, numerology, astrology and hermeticism. Elements of these traditions can be detected in mainstream trading manuals even today.
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Juno Moneta Atlas: Warburgian production or performing context-change
More LessAbstractThis article speculates connections between symbolic, pecuniary and formal economies in light of the question ‘what identifies Warburgian production?’ I propose that method occurs as a reflexive feature in Warburgian production. Engaging Elie Ayache’s discussion of the technology of the derivatives market, settheoretical intersection and the context of context-change I will sketch a non-representational Warburgian capacity, existing in the intervals and velocity changes between reproductive and distributive contexts.
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Speculative science: Aby Warburg and probability theory
More LessAbstractWhile Aby Warburg, in his younger years, advocated a completely rational, mathematical understanding of the world, he lost confidence in this scientific ideal later on. This article proposes that this crucial shift in perspective, redefining Warburg’s opinions about empiricism, rationality and thus cultural evolution as a whole, took place very early on, namely in the summer of 1890. The present article studies, for the first time, an unpublished student essay by Warburg on probability theory. While discussing stochastic and the possibility of mathematical prediction of future events, Warburg’s belief in the infallible exactitude of numerical sciences got first cracks.
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Anna Piaggi, Aby Warburg and the Judgement of Paris, 2011
By Judith ClarkAbstractJudith Clark looks at fashion exhibition-making alongside Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (Panel 55) for her 2011 gallery exhibition entitled The Judgement of Paris. By looking at the three goddesses’ attributes, the reproduced exhibition leaflet wonders about the styling of mannequins and props that are intrinsic to exhibition-making but extrinsic to the exhibited object (namely dress), which is omitted from the exhibition entirely. The visual essay links Aby Warburg to Anna Piaggi’s monthly collages for Vogue Italia and their idiosyncratic act of recovery.
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Fashion: From attitudes to poses
More LessAbstractBorrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from a wide range of sources, including scientific photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship.
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Metadata: New perspectives on Aby Warburg’s ‘critical iconology’
More LessAbstractThe article reassesses the renown ‘critical iconology’ practiced by Aby Warburg and confronts it with recent theories regarding metadata and the curatorship of information. A close examination of Robert Kitaj’s portrait Warburg as a Maenad (1961–62) affirms Warburg’s ‘combinatory experiments’ (Christopher D. Johnson) to be a main characteristic of his practice. Warburg seems to have operated by applying what can now be described as metadata to the processes of transmission of culture he was accessing in form of migrating images. Further, the insights he was able to gain, namely his famous notion of the ‘Pathosformel’, may have to be considered as a specific form of metadata too. This is of particular interest acknowledging that in the digital world the migration of images takes mainly place in the realm of metadata. Hence ideas put forward by Warburg are able contribute to a deeper understanding of such phenomena.
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Toward an iconology for temporal object
By Igor GalligoAbstractThe advent of cinema brought with it a different kind of image montage, to which Warburg’s iconological project was strangely oblivious. Are we meant to believe, then, that the cinema does not produce icons? Is iconology destined to be only a science of classical culture, or can it also evolve to integrate into its own study new forms of kinematic art? We would like to ask the question of organogenesis of iconology here, that is to say, the invention of an iconological science for temporal objects by means of appropriate instruments for this new medium. The instrument is both conceived as a means of acting upon the real, and as a means of activating noetic capacities. The aim of our study will be to first outline the iconographic and iconological consequences stemming from animation and flux that have governed images since the birth of cinema, precipitating a crisis in classical iconology. Secondly, through the analysis of the noetic function of animated GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) in digital streams, we will introduce the notion of ‘temporal gesture’ – as a tertiarized retentional technology, which can be reused for imagining an iconology of temporal suspension and insistence. This will be presented in the third part of this work to reflect on an iconological device for temporal objects by the grammatization and the engramming of ‘temporal gesture’, as an art of delay and repetition. This thinking will be based on the video artwork produced in collaboration with Gregory Dassié titled Iconologie pour objet temporel.
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Warburg’s cultural psychology as a tool for understanding Internet memes
More LessAbstractFrom a historical point of view, the idea of moving forces behind imagery opens up a new perspective on the spreadability and effectiveness of digital imagery today, especially in the form of Internet memes. Aby M. Warburg’s theory of Art History as collective memory is not only connected to the early theories of Evolutionary Biology by Richard Semon, but can also be interpreted as a parallel line of thought to Carl Jung’s psychological concept of archetype. The question of how cultural content was shared and received was deeply connected with Warburg’s theory of the ‘Pathosformel’ (pathos formula) or ‘Wanderstraße der Bilder’ (The Image in Motion).
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Images – uses – imagination: Lignes de Temps in a Warburgian context
More LessAbstractThe goal of this article is to bring together two methodological approaches to the study of images. The first was developed by Aby Warburg, around his work for the Mnemosyne Atlas. The second was created by researchers establishing the framework for a software entitled Lignes de Temps. I will try to demonstrate that a new methodology in the understanding of images works toward a ‘pedagogy of imagination’. I will also try to show how, from my point of view, this innovative methodology, which redefines the roles of the audience and its relationships to pictures, was already active within the research of Warburg. The spectator-researcher does not need a pre-established hypothesis. He or she can trust his own practice with the images to spark a new string of thoughts. From that potential of imagination and creation, a whole new field of singular and personal images may spring.
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