engleski

Allegories of post-representation: On the future of images

Is it possible to examine relations between works of visual art as autonomous carriers of an artistic message on the one hand, and those same works as metapictorial objects that are capable of ‒ when observed from a specific standpoint ‒ “explaining themselves”? In the paper I will claim that visual culture of contemporary films and digital reproduction in general, together with the filmic representations of genetic cloning and humanoid robots, may acquire the status of theoretical objects in themselves, inasmuch as their “allegorical impulses” point to a whole new relationship of the narrative vs. representational function of visual media. In the seminal text “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism” of 1980, Craig Owens says that “allegories do not create images but absorb them”. But, what is then the function of this twofold allegorical text about other texts or, in our case, (filmic) image about other images? I will argue that the new philosophy of image requires attention to digital presentations instead of material representations, because the centuries-old power of pictorial presence inevitably yields to a different kind of image ontology: non-material pictorial appearing. This argument leaves a space wide open for innumerable romantic and nostalgic allegorical fictionalizations in and about the future without images. Making reference to the most recent insights of image science, in the paper I will examine movies Until the end of the world and Palermo shooting by Wim Wenders, Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner 2049 by Dennis Villeneuve and TV series Westworld by Jonathan Nolan.

post-representation, image theory, Blade Runner, pictorial appearing, cloning

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