Ana Peraica

Kultura selfija je dubinski povijesnoumjetnički pregled autoportretiranja, izveden putem niza disciplina: vizualnih studija, naratologije, medijskih studija, psihoterapije, te političke teorije. Knjiga donosi obavijesti iz više područja te ih postavlja na vremensku crtu povijesti umjetničkih djela; u žarištu pažnje autorice je prostornost autoportreta, gdje osoba koja se portretira prostor dijeli s gledateljem. Koje informacije nedostaju kad je riječ o transparentnom odnosu prema sebi, i kakav se svijet pojavljuje iza svakog selfija? Kako „svijet iza naših leđa“ postupno zauzima sve veće mjesto u vidnom polju, knjiga dovodi u pitanje mogućnosti selfija da ovlada zbiljom, odnosno da barem u nekoj mjeri posreduje između zbiljnosti i jastva.

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’.
By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind the reappearance of flat Earth theories. Through an adventurous exploration of the ways the Earth has been represented in sculptural globes, landscape painting, aerial photography, and even new media art, she proposes that a significant reason for the reemergence today in the belief that the world is flat lies in processes and practices of representation which flatten it during the compositing of photographs into ‘total images’. Such images, Peraica argues, are principally characterized by the disappearance of the subjective point of view and angle of view from photography, as the perspectival tool of the camera is being replaced with the technical perspective of the map, and human perception with machine vision, within a polyperspectival assemblage. In the media constellation of these total images, photography is but one layer of visual information among many, serving not to represent some part of the Earth, but to provide an illusion of realism.

Photography as the Evidence deals with scepticism and relativism introduced by media theories regarding evidentiary status of digital photography. It proves that similar or even the same type of material, having no capacity of being an evidence, existed previously, in the era of analogue photography, so no substantial or revolutionary change occurred with new, digital, technologies. This analysis is undertaken inside discourses of three realisms that emerged simultaneously with the invention of photography. These discourses are; pragmatism, positivism and historical realism. All of them are defining photography in terms of its evidence. These discourses allocate discussion on photography in different domains as; science, philosophy and political theory or political history. They claim that: (1) the photography can bring the knowledge or can at least serve as its tool (in terms of philosophical machine), (2) that photographic referent is necessary, not only possibly existing (thus; if something exists can be photographed), and that (3) the photograph can only serve to illustrate the vanished time. Still, each of these perspectives is partial, as excluding some other practical usage of photography as the medium. Obviously, as all of them are starting with the nearest definition of vernacular photography, or what is depicted as “normal” or “average” photography, they are producing a fallacy of incomplete induction. A new definition deriving possible photographs from the capacity of its medium, is introduced. Returning to the very start of the photographic process, to seemingly banal parameters as technological specificities, as well as to photographer’s choices made upon it, the dissertation is introducing new domains of interpretation. Introduction of the photographic agent into the discourse, namely, allows proceeding to the domain of photographic ethics, or even into wider domain of philosophy of politics, giving an overview of critical issues when photography is presented as evidence, in moral sense. Primary author is distinguished from the secondary one in regard to rules given in commission, bringing up notions of responsibility, as the only fact being provable, and that is – the photographer „has been there,“ which is coming important for repressive (political, military..) exploitations of photography, predominantly using photography as the evidence.

Reader after series of conferences in the framework of Smuggling Anthologies project , produced by; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Rijeka, Croatia), Mestni muzej Idrija (Idrija, Slovenia) and Trieste Contemporanea (Trieste, Italy) / European Comission, 2013-2014

Culture of the Selfie is an in-depth art-historical overview of self-portraiture, using a set of theories from visual studies, narratology, media studies, psychotherapy, and political principles. Collecting information from various fields, juxtaposing them on the historical time-line of artworks, the book focuses on space in self-portraits, shared between the person self-portraying and the viewer. What is the missing information of the transparent relationship to the self and what kind of world appears behind each selfie? As the 'world behind one's back' is gradually taking larger place in the visual field, the book dwells on a capacity of selfies to master reality, the inter-mediate way and, in a measure, oneself.

Victims’ Symptom is a collection of interviews, essays, artists’ statements and glossary definitions, which was originally launched as a Web project (http://victims.labforculture.org). Produced in 2007, the project brought together cases related to past and current sites of conflict such as Sre- brenica, Palestine, and Kosovo reporting from different (and sometimes conflicting) international viewpoints. The Victims Symptom Reader collects critical concepts in media victimology and addresses the representation of victims in economies of war. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009.
ISBN: 978-90-78146-11-7.

The chapter defines the field of photogenetics, basing its argument on historical connections between photography and genetics in formation of eugenics. It elaborates on variants of the process of simulations in genetics based on photography, starting with Sir Francis Galton, over Lewis Hine, Nancy Burson and neural networks, in addition to genotype and phenotype, defining phototype as an elementary particle in the photogenetic system.

Reality behind one’s back (the “backworld”) falls outside the view field. Being inaccessible, it has been a subject of mystification since the beginning of the Western culture, also present in ancient myths, the one of Orpheus and Perseus. These two myths can be taken as paradigms of irrational and rational, timewise and spacewise relation to the backworld. The first one is characteristic for horror genre, as death appears behind protagonist’s back, while the second in development of various tools to master it, as rear-view mirror. With mobile phones these two have mixed; while enhancing Orpheus to record death behind his back in the phone’s mirror, also producing spatial distortions that confuse Perseus who gets killed while attempting to record a perfect image.

This chapter analyzes the level of abstraction in aerial photography and photography-related media like films, by referring to the accepted division between a landscape and a map. Limited wideness of the human field of vision, lack of overall sharpness and the incapacity to provide a total image along with the details pointed to the weakness of the human perception in comparison to that of technology. The difference between a direct vision of reality and the visualization of it used to be clear in the split among traditional genres that represent our physical reality in completely different ways: landscape and a map, which depict the reality in completely different ways—as a representation and an abstraction. The invention of aerial photography led to its implementation in military mapping, introducing an abstract vision of the reality itself. Modern art preferred new tools of visualization rather than direct imaging, exploited by landscape artists in the previous century.

The unknown, unnamed and anonymous are the pseudo-someones. They cannot be identified as someone in particular, because they may also be many. The only thing they cannot be is no one. But still, they're closer to being no one than to anyone in particular. Through their intervention in the historical axis they mask what is opposite, the process of becoming known (famous), through the opposite process, that I would name 'dis-identification' (disintegration of identity in all the ways of its production; political, social, cultural, psychological …). Most of the agents of history are unnamed. They write it, or history is written on them, though history doesn't write them in particular, except in terms of the 'mass' or the 'crowd'. In that sense, this is a homage to a mass society in which some creative individuals, not willing to identify themselves, are hidden. The theme of this essay, in Barthesian terms, is the birth of the continuity of reading at the expense of the author and the history of the author in general. This piece is trying to go deeper in terms of 'the proper name', 'the institution of the author', 'authority' than just using these terms as narrative cliché. The discussion on the author in Western theory is extended, though not so much investigated in practical terms, in the art itself (except for several examples that might be mentioned before the 'neoistic' practice of the 1980s). But even before this discussion the topic was Anonymous Authors, Nameless Heroes, Unknown Histories (A Local Historical Overview of the Strategies and Motifs of the Variable) Ana Peraica Ana Peraica already explored in depth practically in Eastern Europe. It had a certain success in the time of the partisans — the graffiti authors with the underlining action of hiding their own or their comrades' identities. In a variety of ways, the practice of the anti-author was introduced — starting with the copyright problem (samizdats, tamizdats) and the use of pseudonyms to avoid censorship. But it wasn't only unofficial history that used a 'soft' definition of the author. Official history also practiced this. It was less about a pure use of the pseudonym and more a recipe for an artistic/political practice. There is an intrinsic relation between the name and politics. The former was the necessary background for the arts from 1945, whether or not this was admitted in the artwork itself. Since the recent laws on authorial rights were passed, copyright has suddenly replaced the copyright-less principle. According to Croatia's post-socialist law on authorial rights (Authorial Work and the Author of the Penal Law, 1991), not only is the practice of falsification prohibited, but also that of pseudo-speech, a category under which some well-known artists from the not-so-distant 1980s would fall, including the Belgrade Malevich (Djordjević) and the 'Virus' project of Svebor Kranjc (Krantz). At this point the histories of the illegal and the legal merge, providing grounds for an interpretation that would be unfamiliar to Western European chronology, a relationship which is usually found to be comparatively synchronous, but with a constant delay of inventions of styles.

The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. England, Germany, and Scandinavia have many features filled in, but to the east of Germany things are blurred. Until recently, cities like Sofia, Odessa, Skopje, and Belgrade had next to no definition. Further to the East, Moscow comes into focus, but this is no compensation for the Baltics, sentenced for the last half-century to blank space. In the West, virtually every move of the artist, the art market, and the art public is documented. But in Eastern Europe, no such system of documentation or communication exists. Instead, we encounter systems that are not only inaccessible to the West, but incongruous from one country to the next. Beside the official art histories there is often a whole series of stories and legends about "unofficial," unapproved art and artists. East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the missing histories of contemporary art in Eastern Europe from an East European and artistic perspective. It is perhaps the widest ranging art documentation project ever undertaken by the East on the East, involving a large network of artists, scholars, curators and critics coordinated by the IRWIN group over several years. The editors invited eminent art critics, curators, and artists to present up to ten crucial art projects produced in their respective countries over the past 50 years. The choice of the particular artworks (many of them reproduced in color), artists, and events, as well as their presentation, was left exclusively to the individual selectors. In addition, the editors asked experts from both East and West to provide longer texts offering cross-cultural perspectives on the art of both regions.

Appropriation and re-distribution of author's rights and copyrights is being analyzed on two examples; Cuban revolution (Korda's Che Guevarra) and Croatian Spring (Buljevic's Red Peristyle). There are different phases of appropriation; starting with (1) mitologization and ending up in (2) commercial exploitation, in which the rights of the original authors are not respected, as well as the copyright. The last phase (3) of misattributions and misannotations change the original meaning of the artwork.

In his famous discussion of the transparency of the photographic image, Walton (1984) claimed there are opaque photographs that fail to be transparent because of technological error, willful dishonesty, or author experimentation. Photographic history, philosophy, and epistemology have rarely interpreted such photos. The Fraenkel Gallery’s exhibition Unphotographable (2013) explored such failed, doubtful, and experimental photographs. This essay aims to further advance the concept of the unphotographable by interpreting this exhibition in relation to abstract images from the project Scotoma (2014–2018) by the Slovenian artist DK. Evoking Lacanian scotomization, DK’s project Scotoma points towards defining the unphotographable as a photographic black spot enforced by its technological, ideological, or operator-imposed conditions. Yet, since these shots are still photographs, the unphotographable is part of the photo-universe (Laruelle, 2011). Thus the unphotographable becomes a way of defining the photographable, revealing it as a dynamic field in which technology makes something that was previously unphotographable into part of the photographable.

Contemporary photographic technologies allow erasing, combining, swapping, and generating new faces, changing the traditional relation between the subject portrayed and its portrait. In the paper, two aspects traditionally defining the relation between the portrait photograph and the portrayed person are approached: the agency claiming that someone exists and the personal identity (PI) describing the qualities of this existence as unique. Parallel photographic histories of identity portrait and generative images having their successors in biometric and generated portraits are challenged with the horror movie scenario of the stealing of the face. Although datasets used to train generative adversarial networks are not used in identity theft, technology does not guarantee that the creation of new artificial faces will never have a result in regard to the agency of the portrait owner. These dystopic scenarios can also be anticipated through the study of horror fiction narratives.

Although mental illnesses and personality disorders are largely destigmatized in the contemporary age, some genres, such as self-portraiture and consequently selfies, are still framed in interpretation by diagnostic labeling. One of the disorders that was often taken into reference when approaching self-picturing is narcissism. However, such an approach to the visual genre is limiting its interpretation. This article analyses two sets of self-portrait photographs of a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who spent some time in psychiatric asylums. This episode divides his work into two phases. In the first period, Munch self-records his various actions in space, while in the second one, he focuses on his face and a static half-a-figure. While the first one is actively reinterpreting the world through the self-image, the second one is centering the self as the world itself. Rather than defining which sets are more narcissistic, this article proposes distinguishing between performative/extravert and contemplative/introvert definitions of self-pictures by defining anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraits. Distinguishing between anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraiture may have impact not only on analysis of Munch’s photographic and painterly self-portraits but also on the interpretation of contemporary genre of selfies as well.

Art historians have used repro-photography as a tool since the mid-nineteenth century, often without critically addressing limits of the technical medium. Today, when photo-documentary material is used in automated analysis, image production errors produced by limits of the medium may be built into machine learning, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This article focuses on the uses of photographic reproductions of the works of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), including visual analysis of photographs, technical analysis of the “Rembrandt portrait” style, and projects that employ reproductions in the architecture of neural networks—these all define the new cultural shift generative reproduction brings to visual documentation. The article advocates for a critical approach to photo-documentation in the arts.

Photography has an important place in picturing and documenting environmental changes, especially when they occur in distant areas, or are inaccessible from ground level and/or imperceptible to the naked eye due to their scale. As the invention of photographic technology was officially registered only 55 years after the invention of the steam engine (which is commonly taken as the starting point of the Anthropocene era), most subsequent transformations of the environment have been well documented. One needs to distinguish the time of human changes to the environment, the Anthropocene, from images of the era this term names, which are the way humans learn of their own environmental deeds. Such images may be dependent, yet they are also distinct insofar as they influence the perception as well as the production of the Anthropocene itself, framed by limits of the static, fractioned, subjectivized and perspectival medium of photography. In this vein, the article risks proposing yet another in a long series of neologisms that aim to define the unstable or extreme times we live in: the Photographocene. The Photographocene marks various phases of the human relationship to the environment in which photographs have documented, directly communicated and announced impending environmental processes directly caused by human actions. Yet, this is also an era marked by photographic images of the environment that report but also pollute our relationship to the environment by forming an alternate reality. Thus, this concept enables one to articulate the role that images have in our understanding of the past‐present‐future human impact on the environment.

The essay provides a historic overview of a photo-montage artist Ante Verzotti. It defines three models of analysis, based on image reduction, two of which being stylistic and the third hybrid form.
The first model is the Suprematist model of image reduction, reducing images on formal level of visuality. The second model is the one of Pop art, based on semiotic reduction of the image.

Neither of these art historic movements has left traces in photographic history, especially not in the history of photo-montage in direct way, though both are participating as general models of image manipulation, deepening relationships among the film montage (editing) and visual editing used in marketing, based on visual arts. The analysis shows a direct relationship of Russian montage and suprematism, as well as Pop art and marketing.

As the third model, aside Suprematist and Pop-Artist reduction of visuality, yet another historic model is analyzed – MTV aesthetic, which is a product of editing techniques and distributive models of marketing. This model, contrary to two basic ones is hybrid.

The text analyzes a work by a woman photographer with war background in contrast to the photography of artists that have not being included inside such a context involuntary.
Definitions of physical constraints in production of the photographic image (lenses, focus, aperture, exposure...) are used to provide technical descriptions of the image, rather than descriptive, showing how they work in the production of emotion. A set of technical differences is found in records of scaffolds, the most important being; the type of lenses and approximate distance to the scene... De-focusing and the implementation of telephoto lenses, as for example, allows bridging large distances between the author and the scene, this choice of technology can be seen as a result of fear with the immediate physical contact with a scaffold. In parallel, the implementation of wide lenses and precise, sharp, focus in the same theme can be seen as a will to face the horror of it. Spatial treatment of the author within the scene, defined via lenses and focus, are connected to different interpretations of such images,  as a close psychoanalytic or a distant political.

A historic document being hidden for more than sixty years produces new meanings but cannot repair the history succeeding the original event recorded. The essay analyses the way censorship works on comparable photographs, films and textbooks from the WW2 and the first decade after it.

This essay gives technical details on two photographic experiments, Positiveland (2009) and Negativeland (2009), intended to indicate physical constraints of photographic aesthetics, in terms of material, style and today's condition. Namely, what is commonly seen as the aesthetics of the vintage photograph may be a non-original, romanticised condition of the very photograph splitting apart. With different techniques, in recording and digital post-processing elementary slices of images can be analysed and compared, thus allowing entering deeply into the author's signature and original choices. This solution may be important in conservation and preservation of historic image, but as well in interpretation of photographs.

This paper elaborates on key themes of the on-line project Victims’ Symptom—PTSD and Culture. A clinical, psychiatric definition of victim, rather than a cultural one, is used to distinguish real from false victims. The danger of the media production of false victims lies in its power to re-victimize the original victims, aside from gains that a false victim may win by taking on the role or attitudes of a victim. Contrary to the common stress on financial benefits of being a victim, this article focuses on the negative economy of revenge, as a postponed reaction by real victims, that if
institutionalized may provoke or support and even increase the production of new fatalities.

Although not being trustworthy in terms of qualities, the portrait genre is strict in terms of existence. It represents people that do/did exist. Jean Luc Nancy thus wrote that portrait represents someone who necessary exists/or existed defining that it: ‘paints a subject only by setting itself within a subject-relation; as such, it sees a putative subject (me, you, the painter) within relation to the subject that is being exposed. It sets a subject within a subject-relation and so within relation to self’. (Nancy, 2018, 19). Portrait establishes a triple relation; ‘portrait resembles (me), the portrait recalls (me), the portrait looks (at me)’ (Nancy 2018, 20).

None of Nancy’s relations works with portraits of people generated by Generative Adversarial Networks. For example, in This Person does not Exist, as no comparing subject to any of these images. At the same time, a creator is a machine (Helfand 2019). Yet, this problem can be solved with object-oriented ontologies. According to these ontologies, still, even objects that are not strictly “things” (or physical) exist, in a certain way. Or as Graham Harman, the author of the theory of OOO flamboyantly describes; “along with diamonds, rope and neutrons, objects may include armies, monsters, square circles and leagues of real

o retrato

• on

portraiture 211

and fictitious nations.” (Harman 2011, 66-67). So is true with “people who do not exist” - they do exist for everyone who is incapable of distinguishing their physical presence (or can experience individual existence remotely), and that is especially convincing in photographic medium as we are used that – whatever is photographed necessarily exists. Such objects, which do not refer to physical things, but are rather ideas Francois Laruelle names a photo-fiction, defining “a new type of object, about adding fiction to the photo according to a precise logic, without imitation or dialectics, and then elucidating its structure” (Laruelle 2012, 12). Such objects are not made by adding photographs but by “generating fictions that are alike “theoretical captions” (ibid).

Both types of objects construct the world, which, according to Laruelle, is named a photosphere (Laruelle, 2011). Thus, both real portraits and generated ones create the sphere of portraiture.

Selfie photography serves not only a traditional
role of photographic (self)recording, but
also for manoeuvring the space behind one's
own back. Unfortunately, as two realities,
the unmediated and mediated, human and
machine vision, are not matching, there are
many accidents of selfie-makers due to the
crabwalk. By this, the photographic technology
based on the rear-view mirror – in which
objects (may) appear closer than they are –
finally resolves one of the largest tragedies of
human self-perception; the inability to see and
control the world behind one's back.

Although history of art has recognized the photography as an art media quite late, photocamera and photographs were used by painters since the invention of the medium. Through
the analysis of paintings based on photographs, the article distinguishes several specificities that photography has introduced into visual reception, changing the history of methods in painting, graphics and other visual media. These specificities are; a change to technical and monocular
perspective, intriguing perspectives and view angles, effects of lens distortions, fragmentation of gaze, description through multiple details of time succession, atomization of a scene, deep counterlight and halation of objects in counter light, stillness without stiffness of posing, halted and frozen movement, unusual image cropping, perspective bokeh, combination printing and retouching.

Since the introduction of the mobile phone technology, at the end of the last century, digital photography as a medium has changed rapidly, especially regarding the image distribution. With a new stage of Web2 interface development in social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al these changes become more profound, especially regarding
unpredictability of the distribution.
Basing a differentiation on historic layers of pre-modern, modern and postmodern relationship to self, being conditioned and framed with technology, I will try to analyze a shift
occurring in visual self-perception, analyzing changes of visual paradigms, since pre-modern times. These technologies are; camera obscura, photocamera, compact camera and mobile phone camera.
Contrary to the times of camera obscura in which a subject was defining the space, or the subjectivised space of photo technologies, in selfie enabled technologies, subject and the object appear and at the same time; are – the same.

A photograph is a physical extension of the person (Barthes 2000, 17) What do pictures want? The answer in this instance is clear: they want to be loved and to be 'real'. (WJT Mitchell 2005, 309) Portrait photography has surpassed the ordinary likeness and resemblance between the person portrayed and its image; introducing a strict and direct causal relationship between the two. For that, the medium of photography was used for identification and face control ever since its invention. A French police officer, Alphonse Bertillon, was the first to introduce the so-called 'mug shot' photography to trace prison recidivists back in the 1840s. The result of this implementation was the construction of the first police archive. At nearly the same time in the UK, Sir Francis Galton used another portrait archive to analyze similarity among sitters, thus managing to construct and explore some abstract concepts like race, gender, nations, or social statuses out of individual portraits. 2 Succeeding Bertillon and Galton's implementation of photographs in systems of power, from the bottom and from above, control portrait photography continued to evolve in two distinct directions; more precise identification serving ground control, but also larger generalization serving large-scale politics of exclusion. 3 These two development streams Jean Luc Nancy recently named 'two regimes of judgment.' 4 As such, I would claim in this article; regimes are centered around agency and personal identity. Namely, Bertillon's work strongly defined a represented agent (and the agency of the agent), and Galton's work redefined something we knew as the personal and social identity, as a particularity within a social group. Contemporary identity photography firmly stands on these development lines from the 19th Century: one defined by identifying the agent and the other by a generalization of personal identity. Due to computer computation and permutation, it is now only much more perfect. In addition to basic identification, today, biometric software can do more precise recognition and trace, or even kill, the agent portrayed. In 2017, face recognition assassination drones were predicted to be miniaturized in slaughterbots, which were patented by the Israeli army bi 2019. Simultaneously, generative adversarial networks (GANs) can compute various racial, gender, and medical conditions out of much larger sets of portraits and provide new ideological stereotypes. Besides serving as control, generated photographs can also bring us with some new pieces of information-producing new composites and morphs-constructing new faces. Using a large set of images of existing people, a generative adversarial network computes their non-existing relatives. One of the most spectacular is the construction of 'new faces' out of the 'old ones, in a project such as This person does not exist (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ by Philip Wang (2019). In this project, GANs are computing new faces, which change upon each page refreshment. Although being a direct product of someone's portraits, we cannot relate these images to their photographically represented ancestors at all, neither genetically nor photogenically, in terms of looking-alike. These

More than offering a visual immersion, 360 photography and video underline limits of human perception. Incapable of simultaneously seeing in all directions, while having haptic and auditive un-angled perception of reality, these genres surpass the human, perspectival and active view.
The multi-focality of a total image is not corresponding to natural human perception, but rather messing it, offering a disinterested and thus non-alive view. Impartial and basically dead, such a view is all but innocent. It is rather a symptom of a new politics of control that cannot be challenged as it acts as if asleep, and cannot be fought against as it is - already dead, convincing us nothing is going on.

Abstract: Taking Central Europe Central Europe is the region lying between the variously and vaguely defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe. In addition, Northern, Southern and Southeastern Europe may variously delimit or overlap into Central Europe. as its theme, the 14th edition of Paris Photo opened with a debate over what should be considered the geographical center of Europe. Some gallerists claimed this center-of-the-center falls precisely in Austria, the country with the largest territorial formation in nineteenth-century ...