Inheriting and transmitting visual forms. From Focillon and Warburg to Manovich (and Midjournéy).

Abstract

This talk focuses attention on the inheritance and transmission of forms and, more specifically, on the genealogy of images from the perspective of French art theorist Henri Focillon (Life of Forms, 1934). The genealogy of forms will be treated through two paths:

• the computational analysis of visual Big Data
• the production of images (with artistic or otherwise aesthetic ambitions) through algorithms, from databases composed of billions of artworks.

The first part focuses on the relationship between the conception of visual heritage according to Aby Warburg (Atlas Mnemosyne, 1924-1929) and contemporary Computer Vision approaches. It is clear that the project of a genealogy of visual forms had remained unfinished in Warburg's time mainly due to technological limitations: not all photos of all works could be available. The contemporary digitization of artworks -at least of the Western world, the availability of online databases, and especially the computational analysis of large image corpora make the ancient project of a genealogy of forms technically possible today. The first part of my talk examines some ongoing research projects in the United States and Europe that are reviving Warburg's ambitious and challenging project and proposes an alternative approach in the act of image segmentation. The second part deals with artistic image-making devices such as Midjourney and DALL-E, which allow new images to be generated from different styles and genres present and available in databases. This second topic will be addressed through the notion of enunciative praxis (virtualization, actualization, realization and potentialization) in order to study the complete itinerary of image generation. This itinerary begins with the availability of all genres and styles stored in the database, which allow for the creation of new images, and ends the sedimentation of novelty, passing through a selection and "putting on hold" of the relevant features of the new creation in view of a new sedimentation (or not) of forms. This second part also questions the authorship of these new images produced by databases and algorithms and the manner through which machinic production operates in the selection of artists' works, styles, and genres through the commands given by the producers.

Bio

Maria Giulia Dondero, PhD, is a Research Director of the National Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and Professor at the University of Liège where she teaches Visual Semiotics.

She is the author of four books: Les langages de l’image. De la peinture aux Big Visual Data, Paris, Hermann Éditions, 2020 (English augmented version: The Language of Images. The Forms and the Forces, Cham, Springer, 2020); Des images à problèmes. Le sens du visuel à l’épreuve de l’image scientifique, with J. Fontanille, Limoges, Pulim, 2012 (Eng. trans. The Semiotic Challenge of Scientific Images. A Test Case for Visual Meaning, Ottawa, Legas, 2014); Sémiotique de la photographie, with P. Basso (Limoges, Pulim, 2011); Le sacré dans l’image photographique (Paris, Hermès, 2009). She has published around 80 peer-reviewed articles in French, Italian, English; some of her works have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Polish. She has directed 30 collective works and special issues on semiotic theory of visual language, scientific and artistic images, and photography. She is Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal Signata Annales des Sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics (https://journals.openedition.org/signata/) (Scopus, ANVUR and DOAJ) and Co-director of the collection ‘Sigilla’ at Presses universitaires de Liège. She is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals and General Secretary of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (IAVS/AISV) since 2015 and Vice-President of the French Association for Semiotics (AFS) since 2013. She has been Visiting Professor at the University of Manouba, Tunisia (2012 and 2013); at the UNESP, Brazil (2014, 2016, 2019, 2023), at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico (2017), at Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas University (2019-2020), at Celsa Sorbonne Université (2020-2021), France, at the University of Turin, Italy (2020-2021) and Visiting Researcher at UCLA (2009), University of Southern California (2020) and at Purdue University (Indiana) (2022), USA.