Sabrina Huchthausen

Digital, Analogue, and Human Connection

I will be transparent and say that coming into this class, I had no prior knowledge of what The Whole Earth Catalogue was but found its relationship to counterculture and cyberculture very prevalent to some of the questions I am wrestling with in the studio. As some of you know, in my practice, I am interested in portraiture and the portrait's function in a time where because of technology, "likeness" is so quickly captured. 

Below I've included some writing/ research I've done for my thesis for those who are not familiar:

While the medium of portraiture may vary drastically, it is consistent in implying a usually human subject, and it also is a social practice. Historian Richard Brilliant writes, with the context of human portraiture in mind:

"The very fact of the portrait's allusion to an individual human being, actually existing

outside the work, defines the function of the artwork in the world and constitutes that

cause of it is coming into being. This meaningful relationship between the portrait and its

object of representation directly reflects the social dimension of human life as a field of action among persons, with its own repertoire of signals and messages." (Brilliant, 8)

A more current instance of the social nature of the portrait comes from visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, in an exposition on his contact with photographic portraits in New Guinea.

"One day at a marriage ceremony, we offered to photograph the bridal couple. The

groom immediately posed with a male friend. We re-posed him with his pregnant bride &

year-old child. It was instantly apparent from the behavior of everyone present that the picture

he had requested would have been routine, whereas the picture we took was anything but routine. It was as if we had photographed, in our society, the groom kissing the best man. Some weeks later, we visited their home and saw this photograph carefully pinned up. […]All

the power & prestige of the camera had been used in direct conflict with one of the most profound

cultural values of this society." (Carpenter, 145)

Carpenter's story is a fascinating instance of how the fundamental role that the portrait plays in the representation of individuals are intensely social. In this example, the two aspects of portraiture as both a form of observation and a culturally adapted kind of social practice are visible; so are the tensions that can exist between those two aspects and the real social weights those tensions can have. 

"In all of its definitions, the portrait is as much an image of a social and historical way of understanding its subject as it is of the subject itself."

 My method of constructing proxies for subjects outside of my physical proximity is heavily founded in the idea of agency embedded into art object as proposed by Alfred Gell. Like how some experience limitations of proximity to their deities, I try to construct a conduit, via a 3D model, in order have access to my subject. The bodily empowerment found within the devotee's gaze, care, belief, and a multitude of different rituals/tasks, turns the object into powerful deities. I also assert my agency and understanding that these proxies I construct are more than adequate to paint as a portrait. Then To simulate this sense of "exchange," as described by Carpenter, I decided to start embedding the last conversation between my subject in question, and myself into the code of the object file (3D Model of the likeness of the subject). It is our social exchange as an individual object file and a vehicle for abstraction by being embedded into the code of the model constructed in the subject's likeness.

And I guess this is where I was thinking about steering my research for this class...

I am interested in the relationship between the digital, the analog, and where they complicate and enforce each other. I watched this lecture over the summer and can't get, "digital file codes and DNA are instructions for reproduction" out of my head.

WJT Mitchell Lecture, March 20, 2012 from MoCP, Columbia College Chicago on Vimeo.
WJT Mitchell Lecture, March 20, 2012 from MoCP, Columbia College Chicago on Vimeo.

"W.J.T. Mitchell is a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). This lecture argues against the view that digital photography does not have the firm grip on reality that was claimed by traditional photography. On the contrary, as Mitchell explains, digital photography offers a “double-entry bookkeeping” of reality that “expands the potential scope of photographic truth-claims along with the potential for lying.”