“WHAT DO PICTURES DO? REMEDIATING IMAGES / L’IMAGE REMÉDIATISÉE”
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Organized by CLIMAS (EA 4196) ET EMMA (EA 741)
With the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Region Nouvelle Aquitaine.
Conveners: Mathilde Arrivé, Nicolas Labarre, Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt
June 1-2, 2017
Bordeaux, France
Jump to a section:
JEUDI 1er JUIN / THURSDAY JUNE 1st
Archives Départementales de la Gironde (72 cours Balguerie-Stuttenberg, Bordeaux) [
Where is it?]
9:00
Accueil des participants et allocution d’ouverture /Welcome and Opening Address, Jean-Paul Gabilliet et Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
PANEL 1 – PHOTOGRAPHIE / PHOTOGRAPHY
Modération/Chair : Mathilde Arrivé (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) – Yves Davo (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
9:30
Conférence Plénière (1) / Keynote Address (1)
François BRUNET (Université Paris 7), “Reproduction as Remediation: Must We Rethink 19th-century Photography along Digital Categories?”
10:30
Pause café / Coffee Break
10:50
Mark RAWLINSON (University of Nottingham), “‘Outmoded Technologically and Displaced Aesthetically’: Photography as Historical Media”
11:20
Véronique HA VAN (Université du Havre), “What Does Sculpture Do? From Photographs to Statues. Remediating Memory and Remedying the Past”
11:50
Discussion
12:15
Déjeuner / Lunch : La Brasserie du Médoc (66 Cours du Médoc, Bordeaux)
PANEL 2 – PEINTURE / PAINTING
Modération/Chair : Véronique Béghain (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), Richard Phelan (Université Aix-Marseille)
14:00
Conférence Plénière (2) / Keynote Address (2)
Ernst VAN ALPHEN (Leiden University), “Immediacy versus Hypermediacy, Straight versus Un-straight: Staged Photography as Remediation”
15:00
Pause café / Coffee Break
15:15
Florian LEITNER (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin), “Remediating Painting - Absolute Movement in Clouzot’s Le mystère Picasso”
15:45
Denis VIVA (University of Trento), “Conflicting Diagrams: Erle Loran and Roy Lichtenstein Debating at the Rise of Pop Art”
16:15
Ela KRIEGER (Jacobs University, Bremen), “Remediation as Revival of an ‘Old’ Medium”
16:45
Discussion et table-ronde
18:30
Vernissage/Opening, Galerie Arrêt sur Image [45, Cours du Médoc, Bordeaux]
Exposition Remediation / Remédiatisation de Laetitia Molenaar / Opening of the exhibition Remediation / Remédiatisation by Laetitia Molenaar
20:30
Dîner en ville / Dinner in town, Au Bouchon des Chartrons [52 Quai Bacalan, Bordeaux]
VENDREDI 2 JUIN / FRIDAY JUNE 2nd
Pôle Judiciaire et Juridique – Université de Bordeaux [ 35, Place Pey Berland, Bordeaux]
PANEL 3 – ROMAN GRAPHIQUE ET BANDE-DESSINÉE / COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
Modération / Chair : Nicolas Labarre - Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
9:30
Charles JOSEPH (Université d’Angers), “Superheroes at the Museum: Remediation through Re/collection”
10:00
Benoît CRUCIFIX (University of Liège and UC Louvain), “What do Comics do to Graphic Novels? Remediating Old Comics”
10 :30
Côme MARTIN (Université Paris-Est Créteil), « L’imprimé comme remédiation du multimédia ? Élasticité du roman multimodal »
11:00
Pause café / Coffee Break
11:15
Conférence Plénière (3) / Keynote Address (3)
Jan BAETENS (University of Leuven), “Remediation in the Era of Hybridization”
12:30
Déjeuner / Lunch, Le Bistrot du Musée [37 Place Pey Berland, Bordeaux]
PANEL 4 – MULTIMODALITE & NOUVEAUX MEDIAS / MULTIMODALITY & NEW MEDIA
Modération / Chair : Pascale Antolin (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
14:00
Miriam KIENLE (University of Kentucky), “Remediating Connectivity: Mail Art and the Rise of the Network Society”
14:30
Nicolas LABARRE (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), « Fable 3, remédier le jeu de rôle sur table : enjeux génériques »
15:00
Pause café / Coffee Break
15:15
Yves DAVO (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), « De la ‘remediation ’ des images à leur ultime ‘démédiation’: le 11 septembre vu par Ronald Sukenick »
15 :45
Camille ROUQUET (Université Paris 7), “Fashioning the Notion of Media Influence: The Remediated Images of the Vietnam War”
16:15
Discussion et clôture / Discussion and closing remarks
Jump to a section:
- Panel 1 - Photography. 2
- Panel 2 - Painting.
- Panel 3 – Comics and Graphic Novels.
- Panel 4 - Multimodality and New Media.
Day 1
Panel 1 - Photography
Conférence Plénière (1) / Keynote Address (1)
François BRUNET (Université Paris 7), “Reproduction as Remediation: Must We Rethink 19th-century Photography along Digital Categories?”
Although remediation, as theorized by Bolter and Grusin in 1999, is explicitly anchored in digital culture and has since been widely adopted as a defining, even over-arching, mechanism of digital creation, the concept has also spawned a larger, transhistorical approach to the history of media and art, foregrounding processes of refashioning, repurposing, and more generally intermediality in all eras and areas of pictorial and artistic creation rather than in the sole digital era. Thus, in a sense, remediation itself — like other critical concepts, genres or modes born of digital culture — tends to « remediate » art history, whether consciously and purposefully or not. The present talk will serve to explore one possible target for this current, pervasive trend: photography in its « reproductive » function, as it was understood in the very extensive 19th-century practice of artistic reproduction ; and raise the question whether an appealing « new » interpretation of 19th-century photographic reproduction as remediation — and thereby as a form of art in its own right — should be considered as an invalid, anachronistic imposition of digital culture on early photographic culture, or, on the contrary, as a vindication of sorts of the often neglected merits of the art of reproduction photography, which in the 19th century were clearly appreciated and claimed by some specialized critics. The discussion will include larger considerations on the vexed question of photography’s relationship to painting and sculpture (e.g. should we value differently the so-called « pictorialist » trend in photography if we think of it as remediation, rather than « slavish imitation », and so forth), and the no less difficult issues of exactly what counts, and counted, as « reproduction » in photography.
Biography
A historian of images and American culture, François Brunet teaches at Univ. Paris Diderot. He has published extensively on photography (Photography and Literature, 2009 ; La photographie histoire et contre-histoire, 2017) and on Western imagery (Images of the West : Survey Photography in French Collections 1860-1880, 2007). He has recently edited Circulation (Terra Research Essays series, 2017).
Mark RAWLINSON (University of Nottingham), “‘Outmoded Technologically and Displaced Aesthetically’: Photography as Historical Media”
My proposed paper will consider the ways in which contemporary photographic practice resists the notions of remediation/immediacy/hypermediacy, via the (re)use of what might be called ‘antiquated technologies’: analogue photography and the photobook. The paper borrows an idea expressed by experimental electronic media artist, Paul DeMarinis who uses “’antiquated technologies” to achieve a distance, a discursive perspective so to speak, that would not be attainable otherwise.’ For DeMarinis, ‘historical media’ do not add a ‘pseudoscopic depth but a real one.’ With DeMarinis in mind, I want to look back to the 1970s, specifically to Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s project, Evidence. This project is an early example of emergent postmodern strategies which foregrounded medium context in the production of photographic (and by extension, all) meaning. Mandel and Sultan’s strategies have become ever more refined, and so I will also discuss a recent photographic project, Sugar Paper Theories, by Jack Latham. This project also explores the nature of evidence but this time in relation to memory in the real-life case of the disappearance of two men in southwest Iceland in the 1970s. Latham’s photobook consists of re-photographed crime scenes; original police documentation; diary entries from those arrested and questioned about the disappearances; and text and diagrams by conspiracy theorists. At its core, the project is an engagement with the psychological condition suffered by those arrested as part of the case: ‘memory distrust syndrome.’ Ultimately, the sufferer (or the viewer in the case of the book) relies upon external sources of information because they are unable to trust the accuracy of their memory and recollection.
Biography
Mark Rawlinson is Associate Professor in the History Art and currently Head of the History of Art Department at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has published on a range of subjects, including American artist, Charles Sheeler, New Topographics photography, American Visual Culture, and, most recently Coney Island. He is also a writer, critic and curator, with a long history of collaborating with artists and photographers on a variety of projects. In 2015, Rawlinson curated ‘And Now it’s Dark,’ an exhibition that explored historical and contemporary engagements with night photography and included works by Rene Burri, Jeff Brouws, Will Steacy and Todd Hido. His next exhibition will be located in Reykjavik and is based around Jack Latham's Sugar Paper Theories photobook (opens September 2017). His longer term scholarly research is an exploration of ‘Minor histories’ in American photography from the 1960s onwards, a project supported by an Ansel Adams Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, USA.
Véronique HA VAN (Université du Havre) – GRIC et LARCA, “What Does Sculpture Do? From Photographs to Statues. Remediating Memory and Remedying the Past”
Photographs of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima or at Ground Zero, photographs of civil rights activists and students from Greensboro, NC, Clinton, TN and Birmingham, AL, photographs of Marines being rescued in Fallujah: these are some examples of images which have circulated widely since their first appearance. The public aspect of these images – the bringing of particular events to the public’s attention – pushes them beyond spatial and temporal boundaries. Their meanings have shifted from their initial publication, depending on the contexts in which they have been used or the form in which they may have circulated or, in many cases, invaded our consciousness. In this paper, I would like to focus on the photographs mentioned above which have been refashioned by/into sculpture, becoming thus time- and space-bound monuments. How do such monuments deal with reality and with a representation of reality? By mediating an event and reality, what reformulation of both can sculpture offer? I propose to approach these questions by paying special attention to the revisiting of the past in the remediation of shameful, painful or courageous acts.
Biography
Véronique Ha Van is Associate Professor at the University of Le Havre (France) where she teaches American civilization and art. Her research concentrates on the history of forms in public space. Recent publications include chapters in L’Amérique des images. Histoire et culture visuelles des États-Unis, F. Brunet (ed.), 2013; and articles on sculpture and monuments: “Danh Vo: de l’objet à l’histoire, du nom à l’objet, de l’histoire au nom, de la sculpture au nom”, Transatlantica, 2, 2013, http://transatlantica.revues.org/6697; “Placing and Replacing: Authority and the Relocation of Capitol Sculptures” (in Authority and Displacement in The English-Speaking World, F. Labaune-Demeule (ed.), 2015), “La Fayette, nous (re)voilà : inscription et réinscription de monuments aux Américains à la Pointe de Grave et Saint-Nazaire” (in La mémoire face à l’histoire : traces, effacement, réinscription, A. Le Guellec (ed.), 2016).
Panel 2 - Painting
Conférence Plénière (2) / Keynote Address (2)
Ernst VAN ALPHEN (Leiden University), “Immediacy versus Hypermediacy, Straight versus Un-straight: Staged Photography as Remediation”
The postmodern society of the simulacrum has radically changed old debates and oppositional positions in photography and art. In the world of photography there has always been controversy surrounding the issue of allowing staged scenes or manipulated negatives and prints. Should one embrace and defend straightforward (naturalist, straight, pure) photography or what is called “un-straight” photography as a viable position and practice? When in the 1980s Cindy Sherman became one of the most celebrated artists, this question suddenly started to look dated. All of her photographs are staged. Whereas in the 19th century staged, un-straight photography was contested but widely practiced, in the course of the 20th century it had withdrawn itself into the margins of the worlds of art and photography. Sherman overturned the marginal position of staged photography radically. She does not only stage her images, but also draws attention to the act of staging itself. Her work demonstrates that the ontology of the photographic image can no longer be considered with trust in the straight image without construction or manipulation. In my talk, I will use the media theory of remediation to better understand the tension within the medium of photography between straight and un-straight photography. I will especially focus on the staged tableau images of Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, and William Mortensen, the dioramas and wax museums of Hiroshi Sugimoto and the staged photographs of Juul Kraijer.
Biography
Ernst van Alphen is Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University. His publications include: Staging the Archive: Art and Photogrpahy in Times of New Media (Reaktion Books 2014), Art in Mind: The Contribution of Contemporary Images to Thought. (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. (Stanford University Press, 1997), Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. (Reaktion Books, 1992; reprinted 1998). His most recent book, in press at the moment is: Failed Images: Photography beyond its dominant practice.
Florian LEITNER (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin), “Remediating Painting - Absolute Movement in Clouzot’s Le mystère Picasso”
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s documentary film Le mystère Picasso remediates painting within cinematography, a non-technical medium (in Vilém Flusser’s sense) within a technical one. In doing so, it alters the meaning of "painting": from the noun "a painting" (painting-as-artifact) to the present participle "painting" (painting-as-process). It is the latter that we witness when watching the documentary: Picasso himself, in his studio, painting – an ongoing procedure in which the figures on the canvas are constantly being transformed. They coalesce with each other, they are separated from each other and emerge in new shapes. Reminding us of the constant metamorphosis of forms in Émile Cohl’s early animation films, painting becomes, in Clouzot’s cinematographic remediation, a dynamic that undermines singularities, fixed identities, the individuality of any given entity. This becomes possible as Le mystère Picasso treats cinematic movement in a way that seems to be inspired by Henri Bergson, who conceived of movement as a process which divides an open totality-in-becoming into distinct objects and amalgamates objects into a totality. What we encounter in Bergson and Clouzot is an absolute, not a relative movement: It is not an action or a property of a given object but a process from which objects and the distinctions between them emerge – the dynamic that precedes entities as such and that is the condition of possibility of their appearance and disappearance. Therefore, Clouzot’s cinematic remediation of painting is not only a study into the illusionistic qualities of canvas, brush and crayon. It also explores how the moving image refers to the real by revealing film to be an optical inquiry into the processes that constitute a discontinuous reality from a continuous real, actuality from virtuality, and thus form our world.
Biography
Florian Leitner studied Dramaturgie at Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and at Université Paris 8. He worked as assistant director and dramatic adviser on various theater and performance projects at Prinzregententheater München/Metropoltheater, Châteaudun Créateurs Paris and others. After graduating in 2004 with a thesis on body and space in video games he was a permanent screenwriter for Grundy UFA TV Produktion, Cologne. In 2007, he became a fellow at the doctoral school “Bild – Körper – Medium. Eine anthropologische Perspektive” at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. His dissertation “Media Horror – Media Anxiety in Films”, supervised by Gertrud Koch, was submitted and defended in 2013 at Freie Universität Berlin (summa cum laude). Leitner has been an editor of kunsttexte.de – E-Journal on Visual and Art History and is a co-founder of the Berlin-based performance company “Laokoon”. He worked as assistant professor at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where he was responsible for the film studies section within the Master’s program “Aisthesis – Historische Kunst- und Literaturdiskurse” of the Elitenetzwerk Bayern. Since 2015 he is working as assistant professor at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, where he is director of the Medientheater.
Denis VIVA (University of Trento), “Conflicting Diagrams: Erle Loran and Roy Lichtenstein Debating at the Rise of Pop Art”
Could we consider Remediation as a field of epistemological conflicts? Could it be considered both as a “scientific” and an “artistic” tool? After the rise of Pop Art, the way of remediating the artworks in Contemporary Art History has become a two-sided and ambiguous process: on the one hand the Art Historian resorted to photographic reproduction as a peculiar technique for studying the masterpieces; on the other hand, the pop artists began to use photography or comics remediation of the old masterpieces as a creative process. While art historians standardized the art-historical reproduction in order to turn into a scientific document (a frontal, no shadow view of the original), artists like Roy Lichtenstein emphasized the alteration and the commercialization of the original through the photographic and printed process of cultural industry.
This hidden ambiguity became a conflict when, in 1962, Roy Lichtenstein painted two canvases inspired by Erle Loran's book on Paul Cézanne. In Portrait of Madame Cézanne and Man with folded arms Lichtenstein took inspiration from two Loran's diagram: some very schematic black and white sketches, which explained the compositional strategy of Cézanne. Rearranged by Lichtenstein, these two pictures revealed how the Modernist methodology could very easily resemble the “oversimplification” to which commercial images submitted the artworks. But this kinship between Modernist theory and pop culture was blatantly rejected by Loran. According to him, Lichtenstein ironically plagiarized his sketches without any original or creative effort. The art historian restored his role: he demonstrated, by comparing different images, how Lichtenstein literally copied his visual resources. Accusing Lichtenstein of plagiarism, Loran was rather defending his methodology and his discipline from every suspect of “creative” manipulation of the originals by using diagrams and photo-slides remediation.
Biography
Denis Viva is adjunct Professor in Contemporary Art History at the University of Trento and his one of the curators of the next Quadriennale in Rome. His two main projects concerning Italian art after 1945 with an on-line Journal (www.palinsesti.net) and a digitizing project on Italian art reviews supported by the Ministry of Italian Universities and Research (www.capti.it). He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Udine (2013-2016) and a curator at Mart Museum in Rovereto (2012-2014). His conferences abroad were at INHA in Paris on Postmodern (2008); at UCLA in Long Beach on Giulio Paolini (keynote speaker John Mitchell, 2010), at CIMA in New York on Italian Art History Methodology (2015); at Eichstätt University on Giulio Paolini and Michel Foucault (curated by Michael Zimmermann, 2016).
Ela KRIEGER (Jacobs University, Bremen), “Remediation as Revival of an ‘Old’ Medium”
This study proposes that the medium of painting, which was claimed to be dead, is reestablishing itself in a similar process to the so-called Remediation. While Botler and Grusin described a chronological development according to which the new medium relies on its predecessors, I would like to emphasize the ways in which the "old medium" justifies itself by using the logic of another medium. Jasper Johns' painting, Corpse and Mirror (1974), serves as a case study to explore this process. With the two panels of the painting, Johns refers to the matrix and the print, as well as to the printmaking procedures, which involves folding in three dimensions. In this manner, he adds a hypothetical space to the object of painting and overcomes the painting's flatness without using the system of perspectival representation. This intrinsic issue of the medium finds its solution when he applies the printing approaches to his painting. Besides subverting the idea of medium specificity, Johns also shows us that painting is still alive.
Biography
Ela Krieger is a PhD candidate at Jacobs University working in the field of Philosophy and Art Theory. She received her B.Ed. in Art and her Master's degree in the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at Tel Aviv University, both with great honors. Her research interests include theories regarding the importance of the artistic medium; the concept of repetition and its manifestations in the act of painting; and the possibility of innovation through repetition as it appears in postmodern philosophies. She specializes in the paintings of Jasper Johns, to which she has dedicated both her Master's thesis and her Ph.D. research.
Day 2
Panel 3 – Comics and Graphic Novels
Charles JOSEPH (Université d’Angers), “Superheroes at the Museum: Remediation through Re/collection”
Ever since Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl and how Warhol used Superman in his Myths portfolio, a very strong and direct link has been made between comic books and how they slowly but surely secured a now official artistic status in museums around the world. Comic book art has become an art form in and of itself, as argued notably by Bart Beaty in Comics versus Art and Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Des Comics et des Hommes. If Warhol and Lichtenstein’s use of the comic book form helped the musealisation of the medium, its use by these two artists was anchored in their overall artistic project, one which did not necessarily rely on the narrative of these characters but rather on the medium itself and its mass reproduction. The growing international visibility and popularity of superheroes since the early blockbuster films of the early 2000s have, however, changed the way in which the superhero motif has been used in contemporary art, a way which resonates particularly with José van Dijck’s essay “No Images Without Words: Continuity in a Multimedia Culture.” Over the past few years, many contemporary artists have used the superhero motif in aesthetic but also narrative terms in order to create art works that truly remediates collective imaginary storylines through an appeal to different levels of memory: whether it is grounded on the iconic status of superheroes, or rooted in their cinematographic adaptations, or even associated with the rewriting of familiar comic book narratives.
Concluding a part entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Remediation” in their theoretical approach, Bolter & Grusin, who here grounded their argument on Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” stated that “remediation does not destroy the aura of a work of art; instead it always refashions that aura in another media form.” (Bolter & Grusin, 75) This presentation will aim at the transforming process alluded to by Bolter & Grusin of the “aura,” thus also questioning if the transformative quality implied by the term “refashion” wouldn’t be, instead, more of a transfer than a transformation… The superhero motif itself being also exceedingly used by digital artists showing their works through home media and computer screens, couldn’t we perceive its almost inherent hypermediacy as one of the converging points in which art itself is being discussed through its varying institutions, critics, audiences and access?
In order to try to build a compelling argument, I will associate (among others) to Bolter & Grusin’s Remediation, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Giuliana Bruno’s Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media as well as Eva Grubinger & Jörg Heiser’s Sculpture Unlimited: Materiality in Times of Immateriality. Finally, to illustrate my presentation I will draw examples from the works of Audrey Piguet, Gilles Barbier, Adrian Tranquilli, Mathias Schmied, Alexandre Nicolas, Mauro Peruchetti, Eddie Liu, Sacha Goldberger, Igor Scalisi Palminteri, Kay Pike, Jeff Koons, Erró, Greg Guillemin, Jeffrey Veregge, Andreas Englund, Simon Monk, Jeremy Fisher, Jason Yarmosky, Robert Xavier Burden and Mark Newport.
Biography
Charles Joseph completed a Ph.D. in American Studies; his dissertation, entitled Being and Writing (from) Los Angeles: Wanda Coleman, examines the complex and evolving relationship between the work of the African-American author and the city that harbored her birth, life and death. He has developed an interest in the implications and practices of the entertainment industry based in Los Angeles on the city’s history and the shaping of its socio-cultural identity; his latest papers deal with TV series and the super-hero genre in comic books. He has published articles in Les Chantiers de la Création, ORDA, Conserveries Mémorielles, ANGLES and Urbanities and he is currently writing a book on TV series superheroes (Editions Vendémiaire).
Benoît CRUCIFIX (University of Liège and UC Louvain),"What do Comics do to Graphic Novels? Remediating Old Comics."
A widely debated object, the graphic novel has catalyzed anxieties about changes within the comics world, postulating something of a radical break with its past. Albeit with great nuance, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey put forward the bold argument that graphic novels constitute not only a “special type of comics” or a genre, but perhaps even a new medium.1 At the same time, they also repeatedly hint at how graphic novels are traversed by references to the past of comics, at times lapsing into a constraining retromania. This talk seeks out to dig into these questions by focusing on the remediation of the comic strip within three recent American graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven, Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost. All three works recuperate the medial body of the comic strip within their make-up, demonstrating a self-reflexive historical awareness that redraws ‘old’ comics into its cultural make-up. Considering the remediation of the comic strip within the graphic novel, this talk analyzes how remediation might work ‘within’ a medium, reinvigorating the concept in a historical but medium-specific perspective that accounts for the dynamically changing identities of a medium.2
1 Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
2 Cf. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Biography
BENOÎT CRUCIFIX is a FRS-FNRS doctoral fellow at the University of Liège and UCLouvain. He holds MAs in Modern Languages and Literature (UCLouvain) and Literary Theory (KU Leuven) and is currently writing a thesis focusing on how contemporary cartoonists self-reflexively frame the history of comics through various creative, editorial and curatorial practices. He is a member of the ACME Comics Research Group, with which he has organized conferences and is co-editing the forthcoming essay collection Comics and Abstractions: Narration by Other Means. He has published articles in EuropeanComic Art and The Comics Grid, and has written comics-related essays and posts at du9, Graphixia, Sekvenser, Töpfferiana
Côme MARTIN (Université Paris-Est Créteil), « L’imprimé comme remédiation du multimédia ? Élasticité du roman multimodal »
Dans Esthétique et théorie du roman, Mikhaïl Bakhtine écrit que « n’importe quel genre peut s’introduire dans la structure d’un roman, et [qu’]il n’est guère facile de découvrir un seul genre qui n’ait été, un jour ou l’autre, incorporé par un auteur ou un autre ». Le roman a de tous temps été un site d’expérimentations génériques, mais aussi formelles : l’« élasticité » que loue Bakhtine peut en effet tout aussi bien s’appliquer à ce que le roman incorpore en termes de médias, et l’on est tenté d’appliquer la citation de Bakhtine au processus de remédiation.
C’est ce que je souhaite faire dans cette communication en examinant ce que Alison Gibbons la « littérature multimodale » : un type de littérature qui met en avant l’interaction texte-image dans toutes ses déclinaisons les plus diverses, la visualité de la typographie, la reproduction de documents, mais aussi la matérialité du livre à travers des pages trouées, pliées ou à feuilleter. Dans la littérature anglophone dans son ensemble – au moins depuis Tristram Shandy, et a fortiori depuis une vingtaine d’années – l’on trouve en effet des œuvres reproduisant quasiment tous les effets permis par d’autres médias, jusqu’à l’emploi d’images animées (par l’usage du folioscope), de sons ou même d’odeurs (dans plusieurs livres pour la jeunesse).
Il s’agit donc de prendre le contre-pied d’une logique qui voudrait voir, à tort ou à raison, la littérature numérique comme lieu le plus propice à la remédiation et de se demander si le roman multimodal imprimé ne propose pas, en réalité, un éventail médiatique si large, qu’il est à même de cannibaliser par cette capacité à la métamorphose les autres médias existants.
Biography
Côme Martin est docteur en littérature contemporaine américaine ; il travaille sur les relations entre texte et image et sur les formes du livre, aussi bien en bande dessinée qu’au sein du roman. À ce titre, il a publié actes de colloques et articles portant sur des sujets aussi divers que l'usage de l'illustration et de la photographie dans le roman, les récits pluri-narratifs, le livre d'artiste, la littérature numérique, ou encore la typographie en bande dessinée. Il est actuellement ATER à l'université de Paris Est-Créteil ; il est également membre du laboratoire VALE (Voix Anglophones, Littérature et Esthétique) et membre associé du laboratoire GRENA (Groupe de Recherche sur le Neuvième Art), tous deux à Paris IV – Sorbonne.
Conférence Plénière (3) / Keynote Address (3)
Jan BAETENS (University of Leuven), “Remediation in the Era of Hybridization”
In the first part of this lecture I would like to critically address some issues raised by the remediation theory of Bolter and Grusin, more particularly the implicit as well as well claim that the "new" medium is stronger than the "old" one. I will do so by discussing the role and place of "anachronism", while defending a less homogeneous medium definition that gives a key role to notions such as medium feature on the one hand and medium network on the other hand. In the second half, I will try to illustrate some of these ideas by presenting some examples borrowed from the field of the photonovel and its multiple relationships with comics, drawn novels, film novels, and cinema. More particularly I will focus on the so-called "film-photo-novel", that is the remediation (yet not necessarily in the sense coined by Bolter and Grusin) of cinema around 1960.
Biography
Jan Baetens est professeur d'études culturelles à l'université de Leuven (Belgique), où il travaille essentiellement sur les rapports entre texte et image, de préférence dans les genres dits mineurs (roman-photo, bande dessinée, novellisation). Il est l'auteur de plusieurs études sur ces sujets, dont récemment "The Graphic Novel" (avec Hugo Frey; Cambridge UP, 2015). Son livre sur le roman-photo sera réédité à l'occasion de l'exposition sur ce thème au Mucem. Il a publié aussi plusieurs volumes sur la poésie contemporaine, dont "A Voix haute", Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2016, un livre sur les lectures publiques. En tant que poète de langue maternelle flamande, il est lui-même l'auteur d'une douzaine de recueils en français, très souvent sur des sujets jugés non poétiques (le basketball, la bande dessinée, mais aussi les poètes du dimanche).
* MA Cultural Studies: www.culturalstudies.be + http://culturalstudiesleuven.net/
* Research Unit MDRN ("modern"): www.mdrn.be
* BELSPO-IAP program LMI: http://lmi.arts.kuleuven.be/
* Journal Image (&) Narrative: www.imageandnarrative.be
* Les Impressions Nouvelles: http://www.lesimpressionsnouvelles.com/
* Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baetens
Panel 4 - Multimodality and New Media
Miriam KIENLE (University of Kentucky), “Remediating Connectivity: Mail Art and the Rise of the Network Society”
During the 1960s, the American artist Ray Johnson initiated a new form of artistic practice called “mail art,” in which participants received letters and clippings in the post, added to or subtracted from those items, and then mailed them back to Johnson or onward to another participant. Through this process, Johnson and his collaborators drew connections between images in their envelopes and among themselves, establishing an international mail art network over the course of the next decade. Engaging period theories such as Stanley Milgram’s concept of “6 degrees of separation” and Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village,” Johnson’s mail art investigated the relationship between social networks and electronic communications through the analogue channels of the postal system. With continually circulated collages constructed out of the sundry material circulating in the post, Johnson and his collaborators “remediated” the electronic connectivity of the global village through postal exchanges in order to examine the changing nature of social connection itself.
In this paper, I will show how Johnson blurred the boundaries between interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication in ways that anticipated the rise of what Manuel Castells and Jan Van Dijk have called the “network society.” With interlinked fragments of posted ephemera—mixing together personal correspondence and impersonal bills, ads, etc.—Johnson and his collaborators stressed the heterogeneity and chaotic materiality of contact over the precise and immediate transmission of information. Counter the technological determinism and seamless flow of electronic communication proposed by period writers like McLuhan, Johnson’s circuitous exchanges underscore distance, delay, and physical disruption in order to stress the importance of indeterminacy to connectivity. Remediating electronic communication through postal exchange (i.e. the first mass mode of long distance communication that daily brought the “whole world” into work and home), Johnson’s correspondences worked across borders yet did not aim to eliminate them.
Biography
Miriam Kienle is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Kentucky, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her research/pedagogical interests include participatory and collaborative art practices, histories and theories of interpersonal communication, gender and sexuality studies, network theory, and the digital and public humanities.
Nicolas LABARRE (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), « Fable 3, remédier le jeu de rôle sur table : enjeux génériques »
Dans Remediation, Bolter et Grusin soulignent que la remédiation est le plus souvent un moyen pour les nouveaux médias de souligner le "progrès" qu'ils incarnent par rapport à leurs devanciers (Bolter et Grusin, 14-15). La remédiation du jeu de rôle "sur table" dans le jeu vidéo de rôle Fable 3 (Lionhead, 2010) obéit à première vue à cette logique. À l'occasion d'une mission facultative, Fable 3 plonge en effet le joueur dans une partie de jeu de rôle sur table qui semble destinée à souligne les défauts et l'amateurisme de cette pratique, renvoyée à un divertissement pour adolescents incultes et opposée à la perfection technique du jeu vidéo.
Une lecture attentive du contexte de promotion et de réception de Fable 3 - ici menée par une analyse des discours en ligne des joueurs - suggère que cette critique virulente est cependant moins un regard historique critique qu'un méta-discours sur l'état du jeu de rôle sur console et ordinateur, à un moment où cette étiquette générique fait l'objet de débats virulents.
Nicolas Labarre est maître de conférences à l'université Bordeaux Montaigne, où il enseigne la civilisation américaine. Ses recherches portent sur la bande dessinée nord-américaine, principalement autour des questions de genre et d'adaptation, mais il travaille également sur d'autres formes de culture populaire à composante visuelle. Il est l'auteur de Heavy Metal, l'autre Métal Hurlant (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2017), une histoire croisée de ces deux magazines de bande dessinée de science-fiction.
Yves DAVO (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), « De la ‘remediation’ des images à leur ultime ‘démédiation’ : le 11 septembre vu par Ronald Sukenick »
Dans son roman autofictionnel sur les attaques du 11 septembre 20011, l’auteur américain Ronald Sukenick prend pour toile de fond le milieu artistique et muséal de Manhattan et décrit de manière très iconoclaste une nouvelle forme d’exposition éphémère : la disparition pure et simple des œuvres d’art exposées. Cette absence d’œuvres, ce déni ultime d’un art contemporain en bout de logique, dépasse en cela la simple remédiation des images, figurant bien entendu une autre disparition, celle des deux tours du World Trade Center. La « démédiation » ainsi opérée, dans un mouvement métaphorique évident, se place à rebours des diverses tentatives fictionnelles de «reconstruction» des tours par des auteurs nostalgiques et pressés de remédiatiser les images de ces buildings iconiques, à travers des procédés mis en exergue par Bolter et Grusin, comme la réalité virtuelle (Bolter 160-167) ou encore les effets spéciaux (146-158). Chez Sukenick au contraire, l’image, qu’elle soit œuvre picturale ou architecturale, n’est plus ni remédiatisée, ni hypermédiatisée, ni même déplacée, elle est oblitérée, évacuée dans les limbes des souvenirs. En cela, l’intuition de l’auteur fait écho à la pratique photographique de l’artiste tchèque Pavel Maria Smejkal qui, avec sa série « Fatescapes » de 2009, fait disparaître toute trace d’humains des photographies légendairesde notre 20ème siècle. En effet, en se réappropriantle patrimoine photojournalistique, Smejkal donne cette impressionde « déjà-vu » au spectateur, pour qui la photographie restebien présente, mais plus son sujet.
Notre communication propose ainsi d’interroger la notion de remediation introduite par Bolter et Grusin en termes théoriques, à travers une analyse basée sur les œuvres de Ronald Sukenick et de Pavel Smejkal en relation avec les images du 11-Septembre. Notre approche tentera en dernière analyse de lier le travail des images à celui de la mémoire.
Biography
Yves Davo, maître de conférences à l’université de Bordeaux, affilié au centre de recherche CLIMAS (EA 4196), est l’auteur d’une thèse de doctorat sur les fictions étasuniennes de l’après 11-Septembre, englobant le roman, la nouvelle, la poésie, la bande dessinée, le roman graphique, le cinéma, la série télévisée ou encore les arts visuels, pour lesquelles il a publié en français et en anglais un certain nombre d’articles. Ses travaux et recherches s’articulent autour du choc, du trauma, de la mémoire, du rapport entre réel et fiction, dans une perspective de critique littéraire alliant philosophie, psycho-critique ou encore socio-politique.
Camille ROUQUET (Université Paris 7), “Fashioning the Notion of Media Influence: The Remediated Images of the Vietnam War”
The memory of the Vietnam war is in great part made up of press photographs whose graphic content has shocked generations of American and international viewers. The Saigon Execution (Eddie Adams, 1968) and the Napalm Girl (Nick Ut, 1972), are two of these images we now know as “icons”. Instantly famous, they have become universally recognizable but also adaptable to multiple contexts beyond their original editorial context, which makes them highly remediated objects. They are notably included in academic works on history and photography, in which contexts they are often credited with a degree of influence on the American public or Administration. Some say they turned the public against the war, or even caused the defeat. This notion of influence of press photographs—and through them of the printed media— originated in political discourse during the war and contaminated the first waves of its historiography in the 1980s, before being contested by more recent historians. I propose to study a corpus of four iconic photographs from the Vietnam war as remediated visual objects which have contributed to the construction of the notion of influence in the collective memory of the war.
I will detail the first steps in the hyper-mediation of these images through their inclusion in political, media and public discourses, and analyze how their uses, reuses, re-publications, transformations, re-contextualizations and further remediations into film, art, or political pamphlets, all contributed to the construction of a sustainable notion of influence that is still very present in today’s public discourse. These remediations operate a transformation of the content of public discourse about the war and the mass media, but they also alter the perception of the original photographs by the public. These photographs are slowly stripped of their context, their meaning becomes hyper-crystalized and, decade after decade, they enter the realm of symbolic images. These newly-created icons are then a comment on the paradoxical value that re-mediation can affix on simpler, uncluttered images, whose inherent symbolism becomes a mixture of added meaning and original context. Furthermore, I will show that iconic images produce patterns of representation which ensure their own constant recalling and remediation whenever a new image comes to fit the pattern. For example, the photograph of the young refugee Aylan Kurdi washed off on a beach last year forced a comparison with the photograph of the Napalm Girl, because of their shared semiotic content (child, innocent, victim, injustice).
Biography
Camille Rouquet est doctorante au LARCA, sous la direction de François Brunet et ATER à l’UFR d’Études Anglophones, Université Paris Diderot. Le titre de sa thèse est « Le photojournalisme dans l’historiographie de la guerre du Vietnam – pour une critique historique des icônes et des récits d’influence de l'image photographique ». Ses recherches portent sur les icônes photojournalistiques, l’historiographie de la guerre, et la formation de la notion d’influence des images et des médias dans le contexte américain, et inclut de gros travaux de recherche en archives de presse (officielle et underground) et de documents des mouvements antiguerres.
Laetitia MOLENAAR – Exposition Remediation/Remédiatisation
Laetitia Molenaar is a Dutch artist, who lives in Amsterdam.
She is a graduate of ArtEz, academy of visual art and the Photo Academy Amsterdam. She was a painter before she started a course in photography in 2005. Her recent series ‘Here comes the Sun’, 2010 - 2017 is a remediation of the work of Edward Hopper. She relates to the fundamentals she sees in the work of Hopper, "The light of the Sun on planet Earth", humanity and the wildness of nature, both powerful and fragile, in a mesmerizing magical light. She dived into the project because she wanted to find out more about how he captured the facts of life / the mystery of life in a essential minimal way.
To begin with she built 3D- cardboard scale models which she lit with a lightbulb, recreating the sun and Hopper’s painted places into an actual artificial scene. Next, to produce the layer of human life she photographed the models on a set lighted by a huge flood light.The last step in the making of the picture is to put all things together to one vision.
Since 2008 her photography has been exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Argentina and South-Korea. She received a first prize at the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in 2010, a second price at Grand Prix de la Découverte in 2012 and several Honorable Mentions.
Laetitia Molenaar est une artiste néerlandaise qui vit à Amsterdam.
Elle est diplômée de ArtEz, l’école d’arts visuels, et de la Photo Academy à Amsterdam. Elle était peintre jusqu’en 2005, année où elle décida de suivre un cours sur la photographie.
Sa série de photographies la plus récente, ‘Here comes the Sun’, 2010 - 2017, est un travail de remédiatisation à partir des oeuvres du peintre Edward Hopper. Elle est plus particulièrement attirée par les fondamentaux de son travail: « la lumière du soleil sur la planète Terre », le caractère humain et sauvage de la nature, à la fois puissante et fragile, révélé par la magie d’une lumière hypnotique.
Elle s’est plongée dans ce projet car elle souhaitait comprendre comment Hopper est parvenu à capturer l’essence de la vie et son mystère d’une manière aussi essentielle et minimale.
Elle commence par créer des modèles 3D en carton à l’échelle, qu’elle éclaire au moyen d’une ampoule, recréant ainsi le soleil et les lieux des tableaux de Hopper dans un environnement totalement artificiel. Afin de réintroduire la dimension humaine, elle photographie ensuite les modèles femmes et/ou hommes sur une scène éclairée par un énorme projecteur. L’étape finale dans la réalisation des photographies consiste à combiner tous ces éléments au travers du prisme d’une vision unique.
Depuis 2008, ses œuvres ont été exposées aux Pays-Bas, en Belgique, en France, en Allemagne, en Argentine et en Corée du Sud. Elle a reçu le premier prix du Julia Margaret Cameron Award en 2010, le second prix du Grand Prix de la Découverte in 2012, et plusieurs Mentions Honorables.