Semester:
Offered:
Seth Estrin
This course focuses on the living image—a concept central to many artistic traditions both globally and historically. Such an image can possess qualities normally only found in human beings or other living creatures: movement, speech, social agency, and even emotion and cognition. In some discourses, animation depends on practices of representation and artistic styles—realism or naturalism—that bring an image's depictive content to life. In others, animation occurs as a product of specific kinds of social engagement or religious practice. Yet others hold that images or imaged objects are capable of becoming animate of their own accord—that they are not ontologically distinct from living beings. At the same time, the affective turn in the humanities has suggested the importance of emotional and sensorial intimacy in animating images. As we investigate these and other accounts of the living image, our focus will be on the methodological challenge of recovering animated qualities of images that originate in distant and especially premodern cultural contexts. Theoretical readings will be balanced with case studies from a variety of subfields and museum visits.