ARTH 582JThe World as Image

Catalog

In what was arguably the first philosophy of technology, Ernst Kapp argued in 1877 that "projection and representation are not actually all that different.." The modern history of "representation," and with it theories of subjectivity, realism, and potentiality, have been bound to projection technologies that connect optical apparatuses and seemingly disembodied images. Linear perspective was tied to geometric projection; Kant's transcendental subject has been connected to the magic lantern, Freud and Ferenczia's psychoanalytic theory of projection and introjection to optics, Mercator projection to an abstract vision of space that propelled colonialism, and cinematic projection to the legal definition of race and commerce in early twentieth-century America. More recently these relationships have moved into museums and galleries through installations that interrogate or employ "projected images," and an entire industry of future-oriented, computer-based prediction has emerged to offer a grim sense of coming changes in climate, sea-level, future health outcomes, and economic inequality. It is these histories and futures that the course will examine. How we understand facts, counterfactuals, impossibility, futurity, and fiction is largely a function of the technological protocols through which they are constructed. The seminar returns to the histories, theories, and practices of image projection to explore how its mechanisms define the relationship between concrete realities and imagined states.