ManApparatus

2018

Writing the image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean Michele Rabate, 1995

The aim of the paper is to examine the impact of the mechanically reproduced artforms like photography and film in altering the nature of human perception. With the coming of mechanical reproduction in the early decades of twentieth century, the nature and condition of art had undergone tremendous transformation. The paperundertakes a close reading of the widely known essay of Walter Benjamin-Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction-on photography and film into account to see how the visual process has been altered with technological mediation. The essays examine in detail of how conventional art has undergone change with mechanical reproduction, how photography has altered the way we see, and how film has altered our perception of time and space.The paper argues that with the emergence technologically reproduced art forms, human perception also developed new modes of reception and sensibilities subverting the conventional categories of perception.

We intend to examine here some of the questions concerning the theoretical variants of discussions on photography: we are specially interested in those discursive trends that are still investing in the technical conditions of image’s origins and its relationships with the semiotical regimes of these visual icons. We refer to those theories by the title of “arguments on the apparatus”, recognizing them as an actual driving force in the general assumptions of about the meanings of visual forms in photographs: we still find them specially influential in the assumed semiotic status of indexicality, as an essential trait of photographic processes. As a corolary of such discourses, we find a commitement to ontological pressupositions about some intrinsic, originary nature of photography, identified with the role played by its technical apparata. We seek the matrix of such discourses, departing from the reading of two influential essays on the nature of photography, L’Acte Photographique, by Phillipe Dubois (1983) and L’Image Precaire, by Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987).

2021

2018

Slyce contributes an essay to this volume–deriving from the 2018 Verbier Art Summit with the theme More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age–that analyses our moment and its infatuation with the technological sublime. He examines drives towards Virtual Reality in light of both an earlier moment of technological innovation through Walter Benjamin’s writing on 19th century photography and then signal examples of 1960s practices coming out of post-Minimalism and Conceptualism that explored new technologies while not succumbing to their forces or distanced modes of production. Starting with two signal cultural products of the 1980s in a song by the avant-rock band Pere Ubu and then David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Slyce considers the conditions of making and the experience of virtual reality as art now, some five years before it is imagined–at least by the corporate powers standing behind VR–when ‘we’ will all own at least two such devices. The book, published by Koenig Books, was launched a...

…the greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such a transformation of our diagrams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as things. A familiar example is where in analysis we treat operations as themselves the subject of operations (Peirce CP 5, 162) 1

What shall we call an “image”? Is it that from which knowledge proceeds or that which anticipates knowledge? Is image something only able to be recognised as object of thinking or it shows per se, in its polysemy and equivocal constitution, a deep, still unexplored generative form of thinking? From the point of view of the understanding of the digital age, where we entered in, to a strong consideration of the new frontiers of science, knowledge, and philosophy and from here up to societal and cultural dimensions, the thinking of the image still remain an enigma. Since the ancient world, the philosophical antiquity from Plato to Aristotle has left this question as a legacy. This question has continued to pursue the history of thought: Islamic World and Christianity, Middle and Modern Age. It can be found massively in contemporary philosophy, culture studies, history of art and ideas. The aim of the international conference is, perhaps for the first time, to study and to explore in a genuine interdisciplinary approach the multiversal horizon of human imagery and, in particular its constructive, generative capacity of building a world-meaning. The international conference is organised on the behalf of the IEA of the University Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) in collaboration with the LESA, Laboratoire d’Études en Sciences des Arts (EA 3274) and the Research Group on the Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Image and Imaginary: Fausto Fraisopi, Professor at Freiburg University and Senior Research Fellow at IMéRA, Agnès Callu, Research HDR at the CNRS (LAP - Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS/CNRS, UMR 8177), Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Research Director at the CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux EHESS) and Alexander Schnell, Professor for Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology.