Reconfiguring the Portrait

Geil, Abraham (ed.)
Jirsa, Tomás (ed.)

Presents a new multidisciplinary perspective on portraiture in the era of post-digital media
Extends the domain of portraiture to include not just painting, photography, and film but also ethography, literature, music video, social media, digital apps and algorithmic facial recognition
Includes case studies from France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Canada, and the United States
Presents ‘the portrait’ as a media-theoretical concept and traces its practices within diverse sets of material, technological, and media networks
Brings together both internationally renowned and emerging scholars across a range of disciplines, including: media studies, art history, critical theory, science and technology studies, and medical humanities, and animal studies
As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation.
This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media – literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces – the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.