Knut Ebeling: Painting in the Digital Cave. An Archaeology of the Globalized Image

 

Abstract

 The contribution aims at a methodological contribution to the questions of a digital art history out of a media-archaeological perspective: For both, digital art history and archaeology, treat images as data without humans and both operate within the condition of an absence of history, a condition which combines the pre- and post-human searches for images and turns it into data mining: Digging for the contagion of images, it is handed over from human hands to data production. The last methodological task is the question of working with images as objects, what digital art history has, at last and paradoxically, in common with the search of cave paintings, whose authors are as unknown as the authors of data. 

Bio

 Knut Ebeling is professor for Media theory and aesthetics at weißensee – art academy berlin. Numerous publications on contemporary theory, art and aesthetics, recently: Die Aktualität des Archäologischen – in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (Mithg.), Frankfurt am Main 2004; Das Archiv brennt (together with Georges Didi-Huberman), Berlin 2007; Stadien. Eine künstlerisch-wissenschaftliche Raumforschung (together with Kai Schiemenz), Berlin 2008; Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten (Mithg.), Berlin 2009; Wilde Archäologien 1. Theorien materieller Kultur von Kant bis Kittler, Berlin 2012; Wilde Archäologien 2. Begriffe der Materialität der Zeit von Archiv bis Zerstörung, Berlin 2016; There is no Now. An Archaeology of Contemporaneity, Berlin 2017.

 

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Daniel Berndt - Beyond the Exhibition Space: Embeddedness and Circulation of Digital Video Art Online

 

Abstract

 Digitization changed the technical characteristics of video drastically. The flow of scanlines has been superseded by numerical images composed of pixels, the magnetic video tape by digital storage devices, the TV-monitor by flat screens, tablets or high-definition projectors. Moreover, the Internet, smartphones, the rise of social media platforms and the so-called clip culture they foster, altered our relationship to the moving image fundamentally. In short: digitization and the internet made video omnipresent and has through technological developments both in hard- and software “widened the spectrum of its visual expression”. Consequently, digitization of video also had an immense impact on how artists employ the medium today. It opened up a new range of possibilities to produce, edit, playback, present and circulate moving images. Digital video not only offers more options in manipulation, the internet also extended the space for the display of video art into “virtual and global spaces”, which in return triggered a shift of how video art now often embedded in an expanded field of multimedia components is perceived.

Bio

 Daniel Berndt studied art history, philosophy, and social anthropology at Free University of Berlin. He was a PhD Fellow of the Photographic Dispositif graduate program at Braunschweig University of Art. Since 2019 he is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Institute of Art History, University of Zurich. From 2009 to 2012, he worked for the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut as its Research Center Coordinator. His writing has appeared in Springerin, Aperture and Frieze amongst other publications. His book, Wiederholung als Widerstand? (Repetition as Resistance?) on the artistic (re-) contextualization of historical photographs in relation to the history of Palestine was published in 2018 by Transcript Verlag.

  My paper will focus on this “widened spectrum” and “embeddedness” of digital video. Discussing works by artists such as Meriem Bennani, whose 2 Lizards (2020) was first presented on her Instagram account and was acquired shortly after by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who in her work Ankersentrum (2019) on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale used digital video and social media both as a tool of dissemination and decentralization as well as to create a narrative around her installation at the German Pavilion, I aim to examine different strategies to circulate digital video art beyond an institutional framework and the exhibition space.

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Simon Zara: Latent Images, Mutation, Potentiality, Viscosity

 

Abstract

 Among the literature dealing with the circulation of images, the endless flow of pictures seems to be a recurring metaphor. This alarmist and iconophobic discourse is illustrated and sometimes even reinforced by certain contemporary artworks. In order to consider this hybrid and elusive object of study, would it not be necessary to build a made-to-measure methodology? Taking as a starting point the art project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002) initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe -the two artists buy a character from a Japanese character design company before distributing it among a group of artists, allowing each one to produce artworks with the fictional character- I propose using the concept of “latent image”, a term borrowed from analogue photography, in order to imagine an investigation method specific to the transmedia mutations of images.

 

  Through their circulation, these images change status, properties, substances and may overflow our need to circumscribe them as completed and stabilized forms. Rather than establishing yet another typology of images, I will propose to study these visual entities within their mode of existence: an indeterminate state, in which all the potentialities are still open, existing simultaneously. This concept urges us to reconfigure our understanding of the image and to apprehend it as a viscous object, contaminating and contaminated by our subjectivity. Any mission of ontological distancing would risk reproducing theoretical blind spots and inhibit any questioning of capitalism logic since 19^th century, which operates a systematic circulation, transforming any unique object into an object of exchange. At stake throughout this lecture will be the understanding of how this state of uncertainty may constitute yet another territory to colonize, to quantify, to regulate and to commodify. 

Bio

 Simon Zara is an artist-researcher, PhD candidate at Lille University and Visual Arts teacher at Strasbourg University. He defines his approach as practice based critical and scientific research on/with pictures. Through works of détournement, mashup, culture hacking, dialectical editing, visual survey and situated interview he questions vision, visuality and the visual regimes in which we navigate daily. He lives and works between Lille and Strasbourg.

 

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Patrick Jagoda: Transmedia Contagions: Alternate Reality Games as Engines of Networked Collectivity" 

 

Abstract

 Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of experimental games that originated in the early twenty-first century. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative experiences that use the real world as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, these games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types including text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social media, locative technologies, live streaming, and live performance. In ARGs, players interact directly with characters, solve puzzles to advance the narrative, and build a collaborative community to coordinate real-life and online activities.

 

 This presentation examines two science fiction ARGs, entitled A Labyrinth and ECHO, which I co-directed with Heidi Coleman and developed with the Fourcast Lab. These games were created from the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as a networked response to this emergent and unfolding crisis. These ARGs used techniques of performance, gaming, and networked media cultures to co-create a sense of community that was shaken during this period. The media flailing of transmedia production became a collective and affective response to an uncertain historical present. Instead of making a game that represented the pandemic or merely shared information about it, this game sought to invent new freedoms through shared play and improvisation.

Bio

 Patrick Jagoda is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and English at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. He is also co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab, and a member of the Fourcast Lab collective. Patrick's books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020). He has also co-edited several volumes and journal special issues, including "Surplus Data: On the New Life of Quantity" (Critical Inquiry 2021 with Orit Halpern, Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Leif Weatherby), "American Game Studies" (American Literature 2022 with Jennifer Malkowski), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science Since 1900 (2020 with the Triangle Collective). He is currently working on his next book, Story Lab: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era. He has also designed numerous alternate reality games, video games, and board games about issues that include climate change, public health, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

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Naomi Vogt: An Edited Life

 

Abstract

 More than a series of new media, the colossal volume, variety, and accelerating circulation of moving-images today need to be understood as a new social environment. Vast segments of the global population have become regular video makers and editors, generating behaviours that upset our understanding of distinct media objects. For example, numerous rituals, contemporary to Web 2.0, are invented and spread visually via videos on social media – from ‘gender-reveal’ baby-showers to politically repurposed Sufi rites in the Arab Spring. The birth of these practices coincides with their first digital images, disrupting the previous chronology whereby the establishment of a social practice was followed by its depictions. Beyond the socially productive power of these videos, the latter’s forms and structures also spill out into ‘real-life’, determining behaviours through ways of performing for the camera, and through individuals’ internalisation of the rhythms and aesthetics of editing. 

 

  Yet we still lack the language and theoretical tools to grasp these phenomena linked to what we might call an edited life. As art historians, we can learn by turning to artists who both examine such moving-images and use them as a privileged medium to convey social insight. Several artists who recently rose to prominence have in common a highly intricate editing practice based in part on found footage (Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms, Christian Marclay, Camille Henrot, Kahlil Joseph, among others). Focusing on Jafa’s work, part of this talk will investigate how artists bridge the gaps that thwart traditional scholarship when faced with elusive cultural phenomena, such as the stakes of living ‘cinematographically’. Turned into the artistic beacon of Black Lives Matter in 2020, Jafa’s montages propose a syntax to articulate political and media events, in ways that reproduce neither the hierarchies of verbal communication nor the myopia of an algorithm.

Bio

 Naomi Vogt is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Warwick. Her current book manuscript, ‘Inventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and the Moving Image of Social Life’, examines the emergence of new rituals in relation to moving-image culture and video art since the millennium. Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in Third Text, Cineaste, Art Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, JAR, and in edited volumes. She received a PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018 after completing her undergraduate studies at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has been a research fellow at University College London, The Graduate Center CUNY in New York, and Munich’s Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. She is a founding editor of the journal OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform.

 

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Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel : Miraculous NFTs? A Social Genealogy of the Cryptoart Contagion

 

Abstract

 Cryptoart - sometimes misleadingly referred to as NFT - is a digital art form traded through digital certificates of authenticity, known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The exchange of digital works is recorded by and onto the blockchain. It has fascinated the world since spring 2021, when some works reached prices never seen for digital art. Now artists, collectors and new middlemen have flocked to cryptoart, a contagious game where it seems impossible to lose. Not only can digital artists sell the property of digital creations, but they can get the commission they want on each new exchange of the NFT as well. In the meantime, the corresponding digital images continue to circulate in an infinite replicability, which increases the reputation of the artists.

Because maximum circulation and reproducibility are no longer incompatible with scarcity and authenticity, NFTs are presented as the solution to the problem of survival for digital artists. Are we also witnessing the consecration of a new type of avant-garde? The original ethos of NET-Art, its emphasis on sharing, creative commons, the rejection of institutions and market mediations, seems unshakeable despite or thanks to the wildest ratings.

This paper tries to understand the inner workings of cryptoart, by observing what is being circulated within, under which medial and material forms, in and for which social networks it is being circulated. A historical and social genealogy of cryptoart would show it as the interesting denouement of a structural crisis of art, similar to older crises in the 1960s, where the economic and aesthetic aporia of reproducible works was already raised and overcome. Thus, what is new is not so much the possibility for artists to maintain circulation and scarcity (thus survival). By analyzing the other end of the chain of circulation of cryptoart, namely the collectors, we discover unexpected aspects. A recent aristocracy of digital billionaires, who asserts through cryptoart their alliance with haute-couture and pop music, is taking hold of the underground culture of which NET art was the product; while another actor, who had been essential in the careers of living artists, seems to be excluded: cultural institutions.

 Bio

 

 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is full Professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, as chair in Digital Humanities. She leads the digital project Arl@s and the FNS Project Visual Contagions. She works on the social and global history of modern and contemporary art, on visual globalization, the Digital Humanities, the visual history of petroleum, and artificial/machine made contemporary art. Among her recent books: Les avant-gardes artistiques – une histoire transnationale 1848-1918 (Gallimard Folio histoire pocket series, 2016) ; Les avant-gardes artistiques – une histoire transnationale 1918-1945 (Gallimard Folio histoire Pocket series, 2017) ; and Naissance de l’art contemporain (1945-1970) – Une histoire mondiale (Paris, CNRS Editions, 2021). Last papers: “The Time Discordance of Art Globalization (at work and in artworks)”, Revista de História da arte, 09, 2021, Lisbon, p. 8-18. http://revistaharte.fcsh.unl.pt/. And "Provincializing New York: In and Out of the Geopolitics of Art After 1945." Artl@s Bulletin 10, no. 1 (2021)Articl12 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol10/iss1/12/. More information on her personal page at UniGE.

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Max Bonhomme: Composite Imagery and Political Propaganda. From Luther to 4Chan

 

Abstract

 For this presentation, the production of digital memes will be inscribed in the long term, that of a history of composite images conceived for political purposes. The idea of contagion will be considered in two ways: in the sense of the virality of images, their capacity to spread in the public sphere, but also in an iconographic sense: contagion of one body by another, hybrid characters, chimeras and monsters, generated by a desire to disqualify people or political entities. The notion of composite imagery can also be understood in two ways. It refers both to the hybrid nature of the images, conceived by montage of pre-existing images, and to the figuration of composite beings (human-animal, human-object, animal-object). By their irreverence towards all aesthetic criteria, by the manipulation of pre-existing images they bring into play, by their viral circulation, contemporary Internet memes are indeed part of this history of composite imagery with a satirical aim. I hope to show that internet memes can be understood with the intellectual tools of art history, be it formalism or iconology, but also how new media can carry the afterlife of past images.

 

 Max Bonhomme holds a PhD in Art History (University of Paris Nanterre - HAR). His dissertation deals with the political uses of photomontage in France during the interwar period. His work lies at the intersection of the history of photography, the history of graphic design and visual studies. He questions the participation of activists in the making of political imagery in printed form, as well as the rhetorical and aesthetic potential of composite images across time. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Transbordeur and has contributed to the journals Études photographiques, SHIFT, Artefact, Image[&]Narrative, and to the catalogue of the exhibition Photographie, arme de classe (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2018).

  

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Kevin Pauliks: Infecting the Internet. Memes Between Virality and Practice

 

Abstract

 Memes have never been more popular than in times of the coronavirus pandemic (see Google Trends for “meme” between 2004 to 2021). Currently, many memes are circulated by users on the Internet to reflect and criticize the crisis. In other words, the pandemic itself went viral. Originally, memes were strongly associated with viruses. For popular biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in 1976 long before social media, memes are viruses that spread from mind to mind, infecting anybody that is not immune against religious ideas, political ideologies or catchy songs. The transfer of the term from evolutionary biology to the Internet raises the following questions: Are Internet memes and memes the same thing? How do memes relate to viruses and viral content? Whether these terms are used or not, the conceptual change of memes from viral infection to digital picture practice is highly underexplored. In my talk, I propose to discuss the transfer of the term in a historical perspective, challenging the assumption that the concept is literally translated to the Internet. This raises the question, when and where the concept of memes did change. As a starting point of investigation, I turn to the forums of Something Awful, 4chan, and Reddit, where Internet culture originates from. 4chan and Reddit still are important platforms for meme production, reception, and circulation, especially in times of COVID-19. In fact, the first meme of the coronavirus (Corona-chan) was created on 4chan and spread on Reddit. Analyzing Corona-chan will give us an idea of how users view memes and reflect on virality, compared to and regardless of the (pseudo)scientific concept of memetics.

 

 

 Kevin Pauliks is a research associate on the DFG-funded project “Pictorial Picture Critique in Social Media. Explicit and Tacit Theorizing of the Digital Image,” as part of the Priority Programme “The Digital Image.” The project is designed to reconstruct social media practices from an inside perspective of the digital image. Prior to the project, Kevin Pauliks worked for two years in the Department of Sociology at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. From 2011 to 2016, he studied media studies and sociology at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. His research interests include meme studies, game studies, and practice theory. Currently, he is completing his PhD on “Memes in Advertising.”

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Marie-Laure Delaporte: Who’s Afraid of GTA? « The best-selling cultural product in the world»: From the Screen to the Museum 

 

Abstract

 «By far Grand Theft Auto is the most beautiful environment. It’s also one of the most terrible games. It’s really aggressive » says in an interview Joan Pamboukes during the exhibition Open 1 World: Video Games & Contemporary Art. In fact, video games, and more precisely Grand Theft Auto, became a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists. Some of the specific features of GTA make it a particularly used video game for its creative potential: the fact that it’s an « open world », its different social and political interpretations, and even its technological functions. Consequently, GTA became an artistic medium and a media in itself taking part in the phenomenon of visual contagion, as a framework for reflection, between hybridization and remediation of contemporary images.

If Joan Pamboukes uses GTA V in order to create abstract photographs, in a similar way to Benjamin Bardou in his work Do Computers Dream of Electronic Sheep? (2013) by creating the futuristic urban atmosphere of the movie Blade Runner anew (1982, Ridley Scott), other artists twist and employ the game in order to understand its ideology such as the audiovisual installation Finding Fanon 2 (2015) from Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, questioning the post-colonial condition or the video 11 Executions (2015) of Hugo Arcier pointing out the flow and access to weapons in 2 real life.

 Finally, GTA is an incredible object of remediation as theorized by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. It offers the possibility to artists to reinterpret the game as well as other works of art such 3as the ones by Ai Wei-Wei in Study of Perspective (2015) by Roc Herms, Godfrey Reggio’s film KOYAANISQATSI (1982) in a remake by Alan Butler.

 

 Marie-Laure Delaporte has a Ph.D. in contemporary art history from the University of Paris Nanterre. She is the author of a dissertation entitled "L'artiste à la caméra: hybridités et transversalités artistiques (1962-2015) » defended in December 2016. Associate Researcher at the HAR laboratory (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations - EA 4414), she has led her postdoctoral researches on the links between video games and art during her fellowship at the German Centre for Art History in Paris in the research group « Arts and New Media ». She took part in several conferences about the subject: Le jeu vidéo, une herméneutique en acte (January 2021) organized by Liège Game Lab and Le jeu vidéo, au carrefour de l’histoire, des arts et des médias (March 2019) at École Émile Cohl (Lyon). She recently published online the articles « Les artistes ont-ils peur de Mario et Lara ? » and « La réalité peut-elle être virtuelle ? ».

 

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Paolo Ruffino: Contagious games: agency and affect in videogame culture

 

Abstract

 The paper observes how videos and images are produced and circulated by videogame players across social media to negotiate their agency within the ludic simulation. It argues that players’ renegotiation of agency resonates with some of the visual responses circulated in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, particularly in relation to the assumed ableism of citizens and their capacity to exercise their will on the surrounding environment. The paper looks at the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games 2018) as case study. In the game, set in 1899, the character Arthur Morgan dies of tuberculosis. The videogame does not provide a cure for the disease or a way to prevent it. It is presented as the consequence of an invisible action. The research is based on a number of YouTube videos and memes in which players respond to their loss of agency by claiming to have identified the moment of Arthur’s contagion, and elaborate strategies to prevent or cure the disease.

 

  The paratexts preserve a conception of agency based on representational premises, which assumes the storyline to be organized around visible and actionable narrative forks, and the non-playable characters to be disposable and instrumental to save the main character. The paper explores the performative and affective potential of these paratextual practices, and argues that the videos and their comments aim to remediate (intended in the double sense of restoring and healing) the wound separating the event of Arthur’s sickness from the absence of a representation of the contagion. It then concludes by exploring some of the recent visualization of COVID-19, for instance 3D simulations of social distancing, memes, and strategies of prevention, and the implications of imagining social spaces and sociality as taking place within a ‘gamespace’, where all possibilities are tied to the experience of able-bodied citizens.

 

 Dr. Paolo Ruffino is Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths and MIT Press, 2018), editor of Rethinking Gamification (Meson Press, 2014), and Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge, 2021). His research focuses on independent videogame development, labor unions in the videogame industry, and the emergence of nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age.

 

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Rui-Long Monico: Geek & Hustler: The Rapper as an Agent of Spread of Contemporary New Media Aesthetics, Culture & Ideology

Abstract

Fused with references to video games and comics, manga and science-fiction, fantasy worlds and electronics in its lyrics, album covers, films and mythologies, rap music as a genre has – since its very humble beginning – built an intimate rapport with geek culture. "Early adopters" of consumer technology – often corrupting its original application in acts of sabotage or experimentation –, rappers are notoriously characterized by their heavy consumption of both new media and pop culture.

For a few decades now, hip hop has dominated the cultural conversation. With the advent of a generation of digital native rappers – whose Internet uber-literacy includes mastering the mechanics of virality and diffusion –, the frontier, the battleground space for innovation and relevancy, has shifted online. This research will explore the role of the Rapper in the circulation of Internet vernacular, reflecting on the sheer efficiency of the Rapper as an outlet of taste expression, as an agent of spread of new media aesthetics, culture and ideology, from the fringe to the mainstream.

As case studies, a curated array of rappers will be considered, featuring both established acts as well as up-and-coming contenders. Their faces covered in tats, sporting candy-colored dreads, rainbow grillz, eclectic or corny fashion and absurd jewelry, adopting offensive or invented antics and mannerism, distorting grammar, speech patterns and images in their music and videos… these rappers are formidable ambassadors of each and every idiosyncrasy contemporary new media culture has to offer. This seemingly deliberate and prevalent celebration of vulgarity and ugliness offers a polyphonic display that feeds directly to the "Schaulust" of digital fandoms – always in search of social distinction – while matching here all too cleverly the essence of the “Internet Ugly” in a very successful endeavor at gaming the system?

Bio

A trained fine artist, Rui-Long Monico is the co-founder and creative director of Candy Factory, a visual communication agency based in Geneva and for which he has participated in numerous projects for local and international institutions. Academically, he holds a design BFA from the University of Texas, a crisis communications CAS from the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften and an art history MA from the University of Geneva. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Geneva; his research questioning the soft power of Swiss banknote design. He is the author of “De l'économie dans l'art contemporain : entrepreneuriat, profit et critique” (2020), “Voir sans être vu : architecture et politique oculaire de Topkapı Sarayı” (2020), “Le linceul des brumes : formes et fonction des Salons noirs d’Alain Huck” (2019), “Helvetica : véhicule d’un modernisme militant” (2019), “Hans Clemer : il Maestro d'Elva” (2018) and “Donald Trump : la communication de crise comme outil de gouvernance” (2018).

 

Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau: A Phenomenological and enactive approach of intermedial visual contagions

Abstract

Visual contagions are very common in the creative process of many artists nowadays. I have been studying the creative process for many years now, through a phenomenological approach, that is, I am interested in the creative process as a lived experience. I am using the explicitation interview as developed by Pierre Vermersch. This interview technique was developed as a way to interrogate the subjective experience in a manner that is objective and reproducible. Using that technique, I have interviewed numerous artists about their creative process, and in particular I have questioned them about moments that they, themselves, considered important in their process. That includes among other things moments when decisions were triggered by other works, theirs or the works of fellow artists, and in particular by images. A lot of these visual contagions are multimedial, that is, artists are often inspired by images outside of their medium of predilection (for instance, it’s very common for a filmmaker to be inspired by a photograph or a painting). In this contribution, I will describe what I found out about this process of multimedial visual contagion while transcribing and analyzing some of those explicitation interviews. I will also show how the enaction paradigm developed by Francisco Varela is a good paradigm to describe this process of multimedial visual contagion. In short, the enaction paradigm describes how our perceptions are shaped by our cognition while at the same time our cognition is shaped by our perceptions. In this context, it provides a paradigm for how the perception of images is shaped by the idea of the new artistic project, while at the same time the idea of the new artistic project is shaped by the images that are perceived.

Bio

Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau is an artist philosopher born in Paris. He has been involved in art making for most of his life, including film, theatre, photography, music, and creative writing. He has been in turn actor, singer, director and author in around fifty projects in theater and film and occasionally performs as a performance artist. He has also practiced photography since childhood and published his first books of photographs in 2017 (Muir Woods Spirits) and in 2020 (Handscapes). He has two more planned in 2021.

Ivan has also been involved in academic research and teaching, in particular in art and philosophy. He is affiliated with the CNRS and currently works with the PRISM laboratory in Marseille, a joint-lab between CNRS and Aix-Marseille University investigating on the relationships between art and science. He is also affiliated with Chapman University in California. He is now particularly interested in the creative process, the link between art and spirituality, and the importance of rehabilitating love as a life value.

Several of his art videos have been exhibited during biennials and collective exhibitions. He also regularly composes for dance and film. His first album, Acousmatic Music 1, is scheduled for 2021.

Anthony Bekirov & Thibaut Vaillancourt: Alternate Reality Games: a new mechanism of the virtual

Abstract

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, typically refer to practices where audiovisual mediums and life-size role-playing games are intertwined – such as Cicada or historical reenactments. They are limited in time, and will often present players with cryptic problems that require a collective effort to be solved.

More recent contributions to the genre have relied heavily on discussion boards and social networks to create a new brand of ARG, one in which the individual viewing experience is absorbed into a collective exegesis. These can be internet videos, fictional video games, music albums, etc. The one commonality between them is the fact they are presented neither as a game nor as a problem awaiting resolution; their creators, in fact, try hard to hide the fact they are ARGs at all. However, the viewer will notice audiovisual or narrative inconsistencies that create a divergence between the actual viewing and the “ideal”, unsuspecting viewing. The “game” for the viewer consists therefore of understanding there is a game. The viewer will then be led to other mediums (video games, websites, geographical locations, mp3 files, etc.) relevant to the ARG – indeed a cross-platform experience. Because the spectator will gain access to these other mediums through hints within the ARG, their interpretative power is inexhaustible, as any element could be another clue to the problem. Every aspect of the work thus becomes a sign or symbol in a virtually endless set of meanings.

In this intervention, we will present, analyze and try to situate ARGs within the mediums they invoke. Furthermore, we will discuss the psychological aspect of playing an ARG, that is, how this new kind of narration posits the virtual as an aesthetic of its own.

Bio

Anthony Bekirov holds a Bachelor’s degree in Arts at the University of Lausanne (2012), and is currently writing his Master’s Thesis in Japanese Studies at Geneva University. He writes for art and cinema magazines and has published among other things : « Le jeu-vidéo, expérience-limite du sujet », Paris 2017, with T. Vaillancourt ; « Une généalogie du romanesque », Paris 2020, with T. Vaillancourt ; « Frontières, liminalité et multitude : sondes théoriques pour illimiter le sujet », Paris, 2020 (online), with T. Vaillancourt ; « Textual, Liminal, Fantastical Spaces in Kanai Mieko’s Early Writings » in Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature, London : Lexington, tbp.

Thibaut Vaillancourt is currently doing a PhD between Medienwissenschaft (University of Konstanz) and aesthetics (University of Paris-Nanterre). Among other things he has published : « Simulacres et reenactment : l’aura de Laura entre cinéma et télévision, de Preminger (Laura) à Lynch (Twin Peaks) », Montréal 2017 ; « Le jeu-vidéo, expérience-limite du sujet », Paris 2017; « Esquisse d’une généalogie du romanesque, du point de vue du jeu vidéo », Paris 2020, both with A. Bekirov ; « Le mème comme descendance prolifique du net.art – entre dispositif, appropriation et subjectivation »,  Paris 2020  ;

 

Gabriele Marino: The Semiotics of Internet Memes

Abstract

Circulating mainly as captioned pictures and videos (but being a form of thought in the first place), memes are featured with vivid synthetic qualities and easiness to be modified and personalized; in this respect their pre-digital phylogeny may include: anonymous art (from Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” to Banksy), political mottos (prototypical catchphrase “Keep calm and carry on”), remix cultures (from Aristophanes to subvertising), vernacular religious iconography (the countless, diatopically diverse representations of the very same saintly figure). On the one hand, memes feature a striking, “whimsical” (Shifman) element, a punctum (Barthes), which is a mistake in a very broad sense (from the broken English of LOLcats to the exaggerated physiognomy of emoticons and rage faces). On the other hand, they feature a template, a modular “serial syntagm” (Geninasca), being “rickety” (Eco). Memes can be created according to three main “radicals” (Frye), which outline both a chronological and syntactic-pragmatic typology (a digital update of Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” and Genette’s “hypertextuality”): sharing, remixing, and remaking. There is no such thing as the alleged “formula of virality” whose myth is being elaborated within digital marketing; in fact, virality itself embraces the forms of formulaic communication, wherein each single user may express themselves idiosyncratically: by either letting themselves being “infected” or contrasting broadcasted messages, in order to participate in the flow of online discourse. Proper memes are not merely “viral content”, as they actually do multiply virality to the square: they are not so much the means to spread a given piece of media, nor they talk about it per se; rather, they are the parody of the very Internet fad, addressing our collective obsession for it. The paper will support these theoretical proposals by relying upon case studies drawn among the most popular mainstream Internet memes, such as the “facepalm” and the “Distracted boyfriend”.

Bio

Gabriele Marino is assistant professor in semiotics at the University of Turin, Italy, where he teaches Semiotics of music cultures. His scientific interests revolve around music, online communication and theoretical issues in semiotics.