1. Representation 3

2. Representations and schemata
Do we represent what we see?

3. Magritte: The Uses of Speech (or do we represent what we see?

4. Magritte: The Interpretation of Dreams
Or: do we even see what is there?

5. Gentile da Fabriano: Adoration of the Magi (1322-3)

6. Rubens:
Adoration of the
Magi
(1633)

7. Do we represent what we see?
Do we see what is there?
Relief of the divine birth of Hatshepsut

8. Alain: Egyptian life class (1955)

9. the power of representations
‘society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord)
Emile Zola: “I don’t think we can claim that we have seen something until we have not photographed it”
Radical uncertainty

10. Magritte: The Human Condition
Images replace what we see

11. Andy Warhol: Marilyn (pink) 1960s

13. Warhol’s prints Technology: silkscreen print (stencil)
cheap, poor quality, mass-produced image
no ‘realism’
Face ≈ soul
the body is well-known public property
an image where the soul should be

14. Claude glass - Thomas Gainsborough

15. Tintern Abbey through a Claude glass

16. Claude glass Named after Claude Lorrain
Small portable mirror tinted with dark foil
Recommended to 18th-century painters
picturesque effect
the very idea of ‘landscape’

17. Tintern Abbey

18. Technologies of representation
New technologies:
change our views of representation itself and of the world we see
(e.g. ‘photograhic memory’)
They change how we (can) see and what we see

19. Prosthetic images we could not see these things otherwise
Microscope was called by Richard Hooke, its inventor, an „artificial organ” (1665), that ‘supplies the infirmities’ of the natural
How can we check images of the ‘invisible’?

20. 19th-century cartoon about the microscope

21. Mrs. Röntgen’s
hand

22. embryo scan

23. the dark side of the moon

24. M. C. Escher: Relativity

25. M. C. Escher: Waterfall
We want to see or construct the image as a representation
‘we draw whatever we want to’

26. analog and digital images
digital vs analog technologies of making images
digital images stored as data (digit=cypher)
‘represent’ a matrix rather than an image
Images are generated by formulas, algorithms

27. the hyperreal
HYPERREAL: ‘the generation by models of of a real without origin in reality’ (Jean Baudrillard)
images that are not representations
generated by formulas, algorithms

28. cyberspace
“I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were…These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can’t see but you know is there.” (William Gibson: Neuromancer)

29. Barbie dolls

30. Barbie doll
Originally designed as a fashion doll for adults (Mattel, 1959)
varieties (ethnic, multicultural, fitness dolls):
but always the same body
teaches fixed, normative gender roles to girls
‘Barbie is a consumer. She demands product after product, and the packaging and advertising imply that Barbie, as well as her owner, can be made happy only if she wears the right clothes and owns the right products” (Marilyn Ferris Motz)

31. Barbie/2 What does it ‘represent’?
‘Ceci n’est pas une femme’ – the idea of a woman
desexualised in detail
over-eroticised in general outlines
impossible body
used as a model – necessary failure

32. Valeria Lukyanova: a simulacrum

33. human Barbie

34. Technologies of the body
female body as ‘cultural plastic’
You can shape your body into whatever you want it to be
Elastic body: transformer
Barbie and human Barbies as ‘posthuman’

35. SIMULACRUM e.g. human Barbies:
thing modelled on an image that has no original

36. Tasaday tribe (Philippines, 1971)

37. Disneyland
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” (Baudrillard)

38. William
Wallace
monument

39. Braveheart

40. The politics of representation
„politics” = power and political interests are involved
Who has the right (power) to represent something?
Who has the money, control over media etc?
Whose representation will be disseminated?

41. James Bond: Roger Moore or Sean Connery

42. posters of Dr. No (1962)

43. Pierce Brosnan / Daniel Craig