Information Society Project

Abstract:

Iconology is the interdisciplinary, general study of images across the media. I would like to consider the kinds of differences I recognized between the basic assumptions of the iconology related concepts of art history, visual culture and cultural sociology. These disciplines all examine the cultural relevance of visual representations and try to construct adequate theoretical frameworks for them. They all struggle with understanding and experiencing the mythical and mysterious lives of images, and aim to provide concepts about the meaning, appearance, vitality, silence, power, powerlessness and social impact of visual representations. Nevertheless, all these disciplines have their limitations that come from their methodological and conceptual traditions. I would like to shed light on the limitations in their approaches with the aim to take steps towards a new iconology that is also well-suited for the interpretation of digital photos.

W. J. T. Mitchell used the term “the pictorial turn” in the 90-ies for describing and analyzing the replacement of words by visual images as the dominant form of expression in our society. As I write this sentence, millions of digital photographs are being taken and many posted to Flickr, YouTube, personal websites and social networking sites all around the world. People capture family events, moments of political relevance, landscapes, architectural wonders, paintings and whatever seems as interesting at that second. Moments of everyday life are preserved in digital format and these digital files create archives of the collective visual memory of the globe. We could describe the present experience rather as a pictorial revolution, than a pictorial turn. I mean this in two main senses: one, the increasing level of participation of the general public in image production and, two, the changing culture and notion of image editing related to a restructuring process of editorial elites.

An iconology for digital photos has to face most of the challenges of all previous iconologies: digital photographs are part of the larger family of visual representations. Nevertheless, digital photos also create new roadblocks for the theories of the enthusiastic researcher and have a tendency to resist hermeneutical and structuralist interpretational efforts. I will consider these new challenges along with the traditional ones.

Biography:

Julia Sonnevend is a resident fellow with The Information Society Project at Yale Law School and an assistant professor in the Department of Communications, Institute for Art Theory and Media Research, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. She received her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, her Juris Doctorate and her Master of Arts degrees in Aesthetics and German Literature from Eötvös Loránd University. Sonnevend is interested in the intersections between communications, art history, cultural sociology and legal theory, her research areas include: visual culture, democratization of visual media, iconology, representation of justice in art and media, access to knowledge, democratic culture, law and performance, art and activism, media criticism, post-socialist identities, Eastern-European media, cultural memory, cultural trauma, feminist theories, contemporary Hungarian and German literature.

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Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm@uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org