MAS 965: Social Visualization Data Portraits

Professor Judith Donath

readings

Required

• Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, chapter 1. (Handout)
• Id/Entity:Portraits in the 21st Century - also DVD

supplmentary

• From Paradise Now exhibit catalog, works by Nancy Burson, Kevin Clarke, Larry Miller, Steve Miller, G Schneider,
• Kevin Clarke's portraits (e.g Friedrich von Schiller, John Cage, from the Blood of Poets)
• Sir John Sulston: A Genomic Portrait by Marc Quinn
• Felix Gonzalex-Torres
• Gary Schneider
• Jim Campbell, Portrait of my Mother, Portrait of my Father
• Diego Goldberg family portraits The Brown Sisters
• Miscellaneous stuff at newnewportrait.com
• Grocery lists

A portrait is a representation of an individual person. The goal of the portrait is to capture some likeness of them, something of who they are. What aspect of the person is considered important to represent is culturally dependent. Portraits of rulers from the early Medieval period often did not depict the actual appearance of the living ruler, but the "imago" of a Roman emperor in whose succession he felt himself to be standing, by "tanslatio imperii". The historical, political and social context in which the ruler wished to be viewed was the image he presented, not his own physical appearance. Indeed, our notions of idenitty - of the constancy of a person in different circumstances and throughout life, is to some extent culturally constructed - and as notions of identity change, so do portraits. Indeed, in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, lifelikeness was the stanard tthat portraiture was held to - and which was subsequently replaced by an emphasis on depicting the spiritual (and later, psychological) aspect of the subject.

Late Medieval portraits are quite interesting from a visualization perspective because of their complex symbolic content. The position of the subject, the background images, and objects in the picture all held meaning.

essays and sketches

Please read the chapter from Brilliant, look at the Identity website (the DVD will be useful in answering the following questions, too) and look at the supplementary sites lists above.