The Enlightened Image: History and Uses of Projection

The purpose of this conference is to reflect on the issues concerning
the projection of still images as this way of presenting images, used
by museums and universities, plays an increasingly important role in
the visual landscape. A projection can be part of an exhibition by
artists or curators, its vocation can be recreational or educational,
in any situation, the projection still monumentalises the image, which
is placed in the heart of a collective experience. Thus, from the
early development of magic lanterns in the middle of the
seventeenth-century, the intermedial transposition has made the
projection dedicated to the collective use of the image and gives it a
status of mediator to the public.

The sharing of images provided by the projection is transformative:
the projection dematerializes images, distances them, changes their
scales and proportions, makes them ephemeral, etc. The projection also
affects the way images are perceived in particular by focusing its
iconicity at the expense of its texture. All these mutations influence
how the projected image is received and creates perceptual habitus.
The new visual literacies, which inaugurated the conception of numeric
screens and their uses, seem to have been initiated by the luminosity
of the projected image. Microsoft PowerPoint, for instance, borrows
the word “slides” from projection lexicon.

The aim of this conference is to investigate the issues concerning the
intermedial transposition operated by projection in order to
understand what projection does to the image, how it is used,
perceived and its received. These questions will be investigated
through a long historical period (from 18th-century to today), to
build a cultural history of the projection including the paradigm,
rather than considering the projection as a pre-cinematographic
phenomenon. By tracing the genealogy of techniques dedicated to the
exhibition of images, the conference will outline the anchoring of the
transition between a print culture and a screen culture.

The expected contributions will explore various aspects of the
projection and its history through specific cases (exhibitions, art
history lectures, etc.), narratives or representation of projections
(advertising posters, scenes in novels, etc.), specific relationships
between projection and print, photography or soundscape, technical
developments (Kodachrome, e-readers, etc.) or metaphorical uses of the
word “projection” (psychoanalysis, etc.).

Organised by Joanne Lalonde, Vincent Lavoie and Érika Wicky
(Department of Art History, UQAM), this conference is held under the
auspices of RADICAL (Repères pour une articulation des dimensions
culturelles, artistiques et littéraires de l'imaginaire contemporain),
a component of FIGURA, centre de recherche sur le texte et
l’imaginaire. 300 words proposal in English or in French, with a brief
CV, should be submitted by the 6th January 2014 to wicky.erikauqam.ca.