Gaze and Representation

Faces convey information essential for social interaction. Their importance has prompted suggestions  that  some  facial  features  may  be  processed  unconsciously.  Although  some studies  have  provided  empirical  support  for  this  idea,  it  remains  unclear  whether  these findings  were  due  to  perceptual  processing  or  to  post-perceptual  decisional  factors. Evidence for unconscious processing of facial features has predominantly come from the Breaking  Continuous  Flash  Suppression(b-CFS)paradigm, whichmeasures  the  time it takes  different  stimulito  overcome interocular  suppression.  However, thisprocedure suffers from important problems: Observers can decide how much information they receive before  committing  to  a  report,  sotheir detection responses may  be  influencedby differences  in decision criteriaand bystimulusidentification.Here, we developed a new procedure that uses predefined exposure durations, enabling independent measurement of perceptual sensitivity and decision criteria. We foundhigher detectionsensitivity to both upright and direct-gaze(compared to inverted and averted-gaze)faces, with no effectson decisional  factors. For identification, we foundboth  greater  sensitivity  and  more  liberal criteriaforupright faces. Our findings demonstrate that face orientationand gaze directioninfluence  perceptual  sensitivity,  indicating  that  these  facial  featuresmaybe  processed unconsciously.

Cet article s’intéresse au rapport des films de Miguel Gomes à la tradition du regard contemplatif qui caractérise le cinéma de l’école portugaise. Dans la première partie, nous examinons les différentes formes de regard suspensif que l’on peut trouver dans la filmographie du cinéaste. Ces formes qui évoquent le plus directement le régime contemplatif du medium sont considérées, chez Gomes, dans une perspective historique. Dans la seconde partie, une analyse détaillée de Tabou nous aidera à voir comment le rapport entre action et suspension contribue à créer une dimension temporelle complexe. | This article aims to reflect on the relationship between Miguel Gomes’s films and a contemplative approach typical of Portuguese cinema. In the first part, we look at different ways of seeing that characterize the director’s filmography. His films consider from a historical perspective those ways that evoke a contemplative gaze most overtly. In the second part, a detailed analysis of Tabu will help us in seeing how the relationship between action and contemplation contributes to creating a complex time dimension.

Il punto di vista è una caratteristica inscindibile ed insita del linguaggio filmico. Ogni rappresentazione cinematografica è filtrata da uno sguardo multiforme che è spesso testimonianza di una coscienza collettiva e complesse dinamiche politiche e sociali. Citando il critico d’arte britannico John Berger in Ways of Seeing (2015): “guardare è un atto di scelta” ed in quanto tale è un sistema codificato di segni tutt’altro che innocente, il quale spesso sottace dinamiche di potere di tipo patriarcale.
La teoria secondo la quale molti film del cinema narrativo classico sono rivolti ad un pubblico eterosessuale maschile è stata elaborata e diffusa per la prima volta da Laura Mulvey nel saggio Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Secondo quest’ultima, gli uomini esercitano l’agency del guardare e rappresentano la parte attiva dell’intero processo in quanto detentori dello sguardo, diversamente dalle donne, le quali sono relegate passivamente alla loro “to-be-looked-at-ness” e rese nient’altro che oggetto funzionale allo sviluppo del personaggio maschile all’interno della narrazione.
In questo elaborato voglio quindi sostenere come il fenomeno sopracitato, che definirò come “sguardo oggettivizzante”, appartenga ad una narrativa per lo più maschile per ragioni politiche, sociali, culturali e storiche senza però essere del tutto esule dall’universo femminile. A tal proposito, verrà approfondito il fatto che il discorso sulla narrazione dello sguardo sia sempre orientato verso un polo binario “uomo-donna”. Affermando ciò, proseguirò quindi con una disamina della rappresentazione dello sguardo queer che film come La Favorita (The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018) e Ritratto della giovane in fiamme (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, Céline Sciamma, 2019) mettono in luce, soffermandomi soprattutto sul genere del period drama. Indagherò quindi sul perché l’accostamento tra period drama e la queerness nelle uscite in sala degli ultimi anni si è rivelato sempre più frequente, sostenendo quindi la possibilità dell’esistenza di uno sguardo orizzontale, inclusivo, anti-patriarcale e femminista anche nel cinema mainstream.

Was heißt es von außen, von dem Fremden, dem Besucher, dem Touristen betrachtet und dargestellt zu werden? Um eine historische Perspektive auf die gängigen Islandbilder von heute zu gewinnen, wollen wir uns zuerst mit einigen Reiseberichten auseinandersetzen, vorwiegend aus dem deutschen und englischen Sprachraum des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Welche Bilder von dieser Insel am Rande Europas und ihren Einwohnern sind u.a. bei Forschern, Globetrotterinnen und jungen Adligen entstanden? Wir werfen einen Blick auf das Spektrum der Islandbilder zwischen Thule, der unbewohnbaren Insel, dem Land der Barbaren, der Primitiven bis hin zu den Hellenen des Nordens, zur Insel der Träume, der Utopie, der Authentizität, der Ursprünglichkeit und des Exotischen. Wie haben sich diese Islandbilder über die Jahrhunderte bis zur Gegenwart entwickelt, inwieweit gibt es, trotz aller Veränderungen, gewisse Kontinuitäten und welche Wahrnehmungsformen haben sich dagegen stärker gewandelt?
Außer des Fokus auf verschiedene Islandbilder sollen diese Fremdbilder ebenfalls mit dem fremden Blick auf eine andere dänische Kolonie, Grönland, verglichen werden. Dabei soll v.a. thematisiert werden, wie die Isländer ihrem Selbstbild entsprechend abgelehnt haben, als gleich „fremd“ wie ihre grönländischen Nachbarn dargestellt zu werden, wie dies z.B. im Jahr 1905 bezüglich der dänischen Kolonialausstellung im Tivoli geschah.
Im letzten Teil wollen wir uns mit dem Islandbild der jüngeren Vergangenheit auseinandersetzen, sowohl der Naturerfahrung des modernen Landschaftstourismus als auch die sexistischen Werbekampagnen für das Nachtleben in Reykjavik. Im Hinblick auf die Islandbilder des modernen Tourismus, soll der Frage nachgegangen werden, inwiefern der jüngere touristische Blick noch Spuren von jahrhundertalter Fremdwahrnehmung der frühen Reiseliteratur beinhalten.
Neben den Primär- und Sekundärtexten, die zur Diskussion stehen, werden wir die Thematik ferner über andere Medien wie Film, Fotografie, Musik und Literatur angehen.

The texts featured in this book have been written by members of
the R&D project Internet como campo temático y de investigación en
las nuevas prácticas artísticas (‘The Internet as a thematic area and
field of research in new artistic practices’), coordinated from the
University of Cadiz (2018-2020).
One of the main objectives of this project has been to analyse
the impact that the Internet and new connective technologies have
had on the development of contemporary art over the last two
decades. The aim, above all, was to determine the inherent critical
potential of these new creative manifestations, including works both
‘on’ and ‘about’ the Internet, by discussing their contributions within
an analysis of how subjectivity and experience are produced, i.e.
processes that so define Internet culture. A focal point of this study
has been to look into artistic practices that have used the Internet as
their specific context for action, or rather, simply, as their main area
or topic for reflection. The creative manifestations in question are
all based on a view of digital connectivity as a key element in the
articulation of the social, communicative and emotional interactions
that arise in the present era. We thus continued with previous lines
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of research into how the allegorical, subjectivising and interpretive
aspects of artistic activity are always shown to have great potential
for the development of alternative forms of experience, as well as
encouraging critical reflection about the habits that the network
system has brought about.
Bearing in mind these aims, included here are different texts that
address a wide range of themes: the emergence and fundamental
aspects of ‘social media art’, the issue of online identity as a specific
theme within artistic practice, the links between digital connectivity
and the physical space (telepresence/teleproxemics, augmented reality,
geolocation, and so on). There is also a focus on the connections
between new artistic practices and digital activism, concentrating
on two of the areas that have thus far proven to be particularly
active and fertile: on the one hand, an examination of the forms
of property and the digital commons, and on the other hand, the
critical thematisations developed by cyberfeminist creativity.
A second focal point of this research project, as addressed in the
final part of the book, has been to analyse the effects of the Internet
in general, and particularly social media, in terms of how images
are created, circulated and received. We believed it was important
to look into the transformations of the gaze and of the images’
modes of existence, in a context articulated by social media. This
was an attempt to at least sketch out a theory about the visual, in
a context increasingly conditioned by digital connectivity – such
a theory is essential for developing an aesthetic, art-based theory
in the post-digital era. This line of work, in any case, shares with
the aforementioned one an ever-critical stance regarding the
ways in which the economic colonisation of the network system’s
communicative interactions take place, which today are almost
always mediated or sustained by images.
Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the
members of the research team for their work on this R&D project over
the last three years, and particularly those who have participated in
this publication. Likewise, I would also like to thank George Hutton
15
for all the intensive translation work that this book has demanded.
I must also express my appreciation to all the research admin staff
at the University of Cadiz for their support over the course of this
project. I am especially grateful for the valuable collaboration with
the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), based in
the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank
University, and particular thanks go to its co-director, Andrew
Dewdney. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all those
mentioned here, and may we continue to collaborate in the future.

This paper deals with the idea that the kind of audience response elicited by certain baroque ceiling paintings, which suggest recession into an infinite space, was ideologically determined to distinguish a culturally elite discoursing viewer from a classed and gendered Other-audience. I trace the idea that this involved tactics of framing to distance the viewer from the Other-audience which can be related to Kant’s theory of the sublime a century later. The essay also acts as a personal exploration of my self, positioned in the field of a Social History of Art.

Stylistically, the Apocalypse cycle in the chapterhouse of Westminster Abbey has been dismissed as “abysmally naive”  and of  “crude...  mediocre quality” . Yet if the cycle is considered in another way, it is evident that the paintings should not be disregarded so readily. Laying aside poor stylistic quality to consider the cycle in a historical context, the work allows the art-historian to consider why the image was chosen at this particular time and what it meant to the monks of Westminster. Furthermore, although the style may not be in itself exciting, the appearance of the paintings merits serious consideration. By including the biblical text and an accompanying gloss by Berengaudus within the paintings the chapterhouse presented itself as an opened book, enclosing the monks within image, scripture and commentary in a completely unique fashion.

This chapter takes Mieke Bal's concept of visual agency as a starting point to analyse Nicolas Poussin's 'Rinaldo and Armida' in Dulwich, and uses hermeneutics to trace how historical paintings can lay down parameters that determine how and what a modern interpreter can say about it. The painting's liveliness motions towards an interpretive approach to the address of the 'other' which must be grasped as an anticipation of an answer that is contained in the work itself, and where the interpreter's ego is laid aside as much as possible. Agency operates not only on an audible level but also through the visual field predicated on contradictory gendered gestures. In its historical context, this painting operated through distinct parameters that constituted the painting's intention, in terms of what was intended for it to achieve.

A paper given at the National Gallery, London in 2007 convened by Thomas Puttfarken. This paper takes as its case-study Cigoli’s 'Sacrifice of Isaac', painted for Cardinal Pompeo Arrigoni around 1607. Responding to a recent presentation of the painting as a morally questionable image, based on the evidence of a seventeenth-century response, the author considers why morality intersected with people’s experience of this painting. Far from being judged as solely immoral, the painting actually encouraged conflicting readings. These interpretations were conditioned by the perceptions of self that were invoked in viewers by the aesthetic employed by the artist. The multiple meanings and implications of Cigoli’s painting arose out of a complex set of interchanges where religious beliefs and painterly aesthetics evoked notions of sexuality and class. This reading challenges the assumption that the work demands a predatory sexualised reaction from its viewers by highlighting the role of class difference in the seventeenth-century response to the painting.

Nicolas Poussin's Tancred and Erminia centres on a woman's gaze. In its reference to noblewomen watching jousting knights, a motif present in the source poem, I argue that the format of the painting drew on ritualized practices of viewing. Contemporary depictions of a tournament reveal the specificities of this visuality for Poussin's patrons. In its replication of the classed and gendered spectatorship of papal court jousts, Tancred and Erminia was able to encourage aspiring papal courtiers to empathize with a coveted viewpoint gendered feminine. In so doing, I believe it offered viewers the possibility to identify with a standpoint, a cultural position of viewing constituted through representation.

This article examines the depiction of a type of looking where seeing and touching play a central role in the work of Nicolas Poussin. Through the identification of a 'feminine touching look' in Poussin's second version of 'Tancred and Erminia', the gendered ambiguity of the painting's protagonists of a dominant, caring woman and a wounded and semi-conscious man. The implications of Erminia's penetrating stare are considered in relation to Tancred's passive touch in order to reveal how Poussin blurred boundaries of gendered dimensions embedded in the motif of looking and touching. In order to do this, Poussin drew on sacred images that evoked social rituals of empathy and devotion, particularly for his clientele: members of the papal bureaucracy. Poussin is well known for his preoccupation with the affective function of art and this painting shows a compatibility with contemporary meditative practice, specifically the 'Spiritual Exercises' of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, which urged the subject to participate in the sacred scene realized imaginatively, in part through a process called the 'application of the senses.

This essay explores multiple aspects of a domestic tourism boom that has occurred in Ladakh, India, over the past two decades. It considers the nature of tourism itself within the context of leisure as a commodity and how visual interventions and photographic practices brand a tourist destination as a consumable idea, making a case for the insepa-rability of image and destination and arguing that the constructed image of a destination attracts a collective gaze. This perspective is then applied to the consumerist trajectory/ tragedy of Ladakh, which since the economic liberalization of India has been visually negotiated through imageries of the area as a destination for adventure and exotica. This experience is enacted through the consumerist practices of packaged tourism, and through a visual exploration of material remains-the paper documents material leftovers discarded by tourists.

Foregrounding Ava Duvarney's powerful documentary film 13th, I attempt to examine the emancipatory aesthetics employed by the oppressed communities. The article also looks at Malayalam and other Indian language films to understand the spatial othering and its recent inversion.

The settlement archaeology pioneered by Robert McCormick Adams extended the scope of archaeological investigations to a regional scale, an approach that has been continued in recent years in landscape archaeology. An array of new technologies for recognizing, visualizing, and analyzing data has considerably expanded the possibilities for documenting and presenting the remains of ancient settlements and land use. Relatively unexamined, however, are the broader implications accompanying these large-scale perspectives, including the extensive use of remote sensing technologies. In this paper, we consider a number of the political and ethical issues raised by these perspectives and scales. We suggest that an extension of the goals of regional-based approaches can bring with it new insights into the politics as well as the economic and ecological problems associated with archaeological research that implicate modern landscapes and their inhabitants.

"The Eve of St. Agnes" is one of Keats’s most challenging poems when it comes to the poet’s emotions and beliefs on social structures, life, death, men, and women. Consequently, The Eve of St. Agnes becomes the arena of the conflict between femininity and masculinity, which preoccupied the poet during the composition of the poem. In the essay, we seek to examine this conflict in The Eve of St. Agnes through the Lacanian concept of the Gaze. This point of view allows us to analyze Keats’s ambivalence towards gender.