Modalities of Pictorial Appearing: Basic Concepts Cover Image

Modaliteti slikovnog pojavljivanja: temeljni pojmovi
Modalities of Pictorial Appearing: Basic Concepts

Author(s): Krešimir Purgar
Subject(s): Media studies, Photography, Semiology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Theory of Communication, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Hrvatsko Filozofsko Društvo
Keywords: image ontology; pictorial appearing; Martin Seel; Dieter Mersch; temporality; transparency; mediality; referentiality;

Summary/Abstract: The proliferation of digital technology requires from us to think about images in a new way. We should no longer refer to them only as Greek eikon, that is, reflection or representation, but as experiences, events and special kind of appearing. In contemporary digital culture pictorial appearing is the symptom of the most recent turn towards images, the one that is happening after the “original” pictorial turn that was described by W. J. T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm almost three decades ago as the epoch-making new kind of relationship between images and language. Today we witness a different kind of urgency: the one that will exemplify the relationship between analogue images and digital images, representations and post-representations, reality and virtuality, semiotics and phenomenology. In this article I will propose a “transitional” theory of the image that takes into account the wide gap between objects and perceptions, that is, between eikon and pure sensuousness. To this end, I will introduce the four basic modalities of pictorial appearing: temporality, transparency, mediality and referentiality.

  • Issue Year: 36/2016
  • Issue No: 04/144
  • Page Range: 799-816
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: Croatian