Reconfiguring the Portrait
Description
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.
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Content
- Intro
- List of Figures
- Contributors
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Configurations of Portraiture: Subjectivity, Techniques, Mediality
- I GENEALOGIES
- 2 Operative Portraits, or How Our Faces Became Big Data
- 3 'This Person Does Not Exist': From Real Generalisation to Algorithmic Abstraction in Photographic Portraiture
- 4 The Face as Artefact: Towards an Artefactual Genealogy of the Portrait
- II (INTER)FACES
- 5 When Face Becomes Interface: Music Video and the Portrait of Mediality
- 6 Tracing Minor Gestures: Relational Portraits with Fernand Deligny
- 7 Lifelike Portraits and 'Life Itself': Deepfakes through Gothic Horror
- 8 Animal Portraits in Social Media: A Case Study Named Esther
- III SELF-CONSTRUCTIONS
- 9 The Subject in the Frame: Aesthetic Opacity and the Reverberations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality through the Portrait
- 10 The Avatarisation of the (Self-)Portrait: Notes Towards a Theological Genealogy of the Virtual Self
- 11 Iiu Susiraja: Self-shooting as Playful Practice
- 12 The Quantification Trilogy's Loss-of-Self Portraits, or Mediating the Technologies of the Self
- IV AFTERLIVES
- 13 As if to Say Nothing: On Balthus's Portraits
- 14 Speaking, through the Eyes, with the Dead
- 15 Revenants: On the Animation of Dead People's Portraits in Contemporary Technoculture
- Index
