JEU DE PAUME - EN

EPISODES

When one says that images are viral or contagious, what do we mean?

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The Holy Face of Novgorod (Russian "Спас Нерукотворный", "the Savior not painted by human hands" (Mandylion), is today a twelfth-century icon preserved in Moscow at the Tretyakov Gallery, amply reproduced (by hand) in the Christian world. Orthodox tradition holds that this icon and all those that copy it are exact copies of the face of Christ miraculously printed on a cloth.

It is generally believed that a contagion follows a simple contact-to-contact pattern, reflecting the spread of a pathogen.

Each person exposed to the pathogen becomes a carrier of the contagion, resulting in a large chain of transmission, linked only to contact with a contaminated agent.

If we try to visualize such contagions, the result will be a straightforward graph, with a particular pathogen at the center, each node representing a person, and the distance between nodes quantifying the speed of the pathogen's movement between people. A single contagion as such is called a "cascade model".

The virality of a single image is clearly a cascade phenomenon, and can be partially summarized in a simple contact-to-contact pattern. The practice of copying, in the history of art, is a good example. The case of icons representing Christ is more extreme, but no less interesting.

Orthodox theology has given essential importance to the closest reproduction of an original image of the face of Christ, which tradition says is lost - for some it is the Veil of Veronica on which, according to one tradition, the face of the supplicant was printed during the Stations of the Cross; another tradition refers to the image that was miraculously printed on a cloth offered by Christ to the King of Edessa.

 

Whoever makes an icon, in any case, must copy as best he can another icon which itself copies an icon which ultimately copies the "acheiropoiet" (not made by human hands) image which fixed once and for all the true face of the Messiah before his Ascension. In so doing, the copyist acts as a transmitter of the original image; an image behind which he steps aside, to let the face of the Messiah reveal itself to all. 

 

Intentionality: When an image circulates, someone has intervened

Viruses are active pathogens whose function is to multiply and spread. By contrast, images, whatever one says about their agentivity, are inert elements, whose circulation requires an action (conscious or unconscious) of a third party. Whether they are illustrations printed in a magazine, television images, works of art, religious icons or digital images, each time a decision has been taken to circulate the image. Because of their status as passive media, images cannot be active agents of change, unlike a virus. When we speak of the agentivity of images, it is not to make the image a magical object.

There is no chain of transmission according to which exposure to the image would be sufficient for the image to be taken up. Any visual transmission requires the intention - possibly unconscious - of spectators of the image who will put it back into circulation.

 

From then on, we have to ask ourselves what can trigger the choice, in an individual, to reproduce or reinterpret an image.

The interpretation - or the eye of the spectator - plays a decisive role in jumpstart of the circulation of the image.

Virality and mutations

The last theoretical problem is to determine what circulates when an image circulates.

When a pathogen spreads, it remains the same: if a mutation occurs, we speak of a new epidemic wave. The same cannot be said of images. An image is considered more contagious than others if its circulation is the occasion of mutations - if it inspires other images, which refer to the original image.

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Overview of images similar to the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937), in our corpus of illustrated prints.

See full page  here.

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The fortune of Guernica, some of whose motifs have been repeated by multiple artists - the raised hand, the squared-off mouth of the horse, or the composition triangulating a cluster of bodies in black and white - these are elements that show Guernica's contagiousness. But the salience of each feature of the image, what caught the eye, in Guernica, did not lie in the painting, nor in its photographic reproductions. It resided and still resides in the eye of the spectator. Different viewers can only perceive and reproduce a selective number of characteristics - for example, the direction and sense in which a line is drawn, the style of the line, the palette chosen, the people depicted, the way the paint is applied, the subject, the perspective, the geometry, or simply the atmosphere of the image, etc.

Once these details are made, which methods will we trust the most to track, describe and understand visual contagions? To all of them, and to none of them.

 

We must allow ourselves everything, forbid ourselves nothing, but be wary of each tool and each approach, as much as we are already wary of our corpus.

By crossing scales and approaches we will multiply our chances of saying relevant things.

Spatio-temporal visualization seemed to us to be the most efficient strategy; however, most of the visualization tools available are only useful for very small image corpora (from a thousand items, we can't see much). To take advantage of the huge corpus constituted for the study, and to allow us to approach representative results, we must therefore accept to mathematize our approach a little more - and to draw inspiration from other disciplines that have been studying diffusion phenomena for several decades: epidemiology and the social sciences. While remaining aware that our objects of study - images - do not circulate exactly like viruses, clothing fashions or consumer practices.

Drawing inspiration from epidemiology

Epidemiological science can provide us with a lot. The recent coronavirus epidemics have familiarized the general public with this approach: we have all heard of infection, incubation, immunity, symptoms, but also of patient zero, contact case, cluster or outbreak, epidemic threshold, prevalence and isolation, or samples, epidemic curves, mode of transmission, mutation, variant and reinfection. Each of these terms is particularly inspiring for our project on image circulation..

If for our images the questions of risk and mortality hardly arise, and if it is not a question either of stimulating immunity in front of visual contagions (more especially as our study relates to the past, which we cannot change), epidemiology remains a particularly interesting approach for our work. Other disciplines also use the epidemiological approach to study, for example, the diffusion of clothing and musical fashions, consumer practices or viral information. In return, epidemiologists have been able to draw on the work of specialists in advertising, consumerism and the sociology of cultural practices.

What does epidemiology do?

To answer this question, we'll follow Adam Kucharski's fascinating bookThe Rules of Contagion (Profile/Wellcome Books, 2020): epidemiology is as interested in contagious health phenomena as it is in the circulation of false news and fashion. By extension, it is quite clear that it can be useful for an investigation into the circulation of images.

For Kucharski the epidemiological approach consists of four main steps.

 

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A search for images close to that of a coronavirus, in the corpus of the Visual Contagions project.

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(1) The first step is to identify epidemic phenomena.

What makes it possible to decide that the circulation of a disease, of a new type of pants or the diffusion of a television program is a contagious phenomenon? The question also arises for images. It is very possible that certain images that have circulated a lot have not, in fact, been viral. The virality of an image remains to be clearly defined.

(2) Once a phenomenon has been characterized as epidemic, epidemiology studies its evolution and extension.

(a) What are the centers of the contagion? What is its geography? How far can it spread?

(b) What about its temporality? How fast does it advance?

(c) How is the virus transmitted from person to person?

(3) The epidemiologist can then better identify statistically certain factors favorable to the epidemic studied.

This is a delicate step, in the sense that the results of a statistical approach must be verified at different scales. The margins of interpretation can be diverse - we all saw during the coronavirus crisis how important the quality of the corpus studied was, but also that the same figures could be interpreted differently depending on whether or not they were compared with others.

For the question of images in globalization, the stakes are not sanitary. However, we will maintain a cautious approach, because the study intersects with strong geopolitical questions, just as it may shake up certain disciplinary certainties in art history, visual studies and cultural history.