The Centre for Semiotics and Rhetoric of the University of Liège is recruiting a post-doctoral fellow (with a PhD degree obtained max. 6 years ago in Digital Art History) for 1 year, renewable 3 times. This position is to be filled within the framework of a project financed by the F.R.S.-Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique which aims at the computational analysis of large collections of images and which will start in February 2022. See the abstract of the research project below.

Interested researchers are kindly requested to write to me with a complete CV at this address before January 28: mariagiulia.donderouliege.be

Abstract
Towards a Genealogy of Visual Forms: Semiotic and Computer-Assisted Approaches to Large Image Collections

This research project focuses on the genealogy of visual forms, that is the filiation of images within the framework of large image collections (“Big Visual Data”). More specifically, the project team will study the revival and migration of forms that are present in Renaissance and baroque paintings belonging to some European museums and that are detectable in large collections of paintings and contemporary fashion photographs available in databases such as the Web Gallery of Art and the Fashion Photography Archives of the Bloomsbury Fashion Central. This research on the genealogy of forms aims to go beyond the studies on visual similarities that are currently being conducted in digital art history and in the digital humanities so as to produce a diachronic analysis of the long period which sustained the transmission of forms from the Renaissance to the present day. The forms that will be examined in their revival/deformation/renewal are those of the gestures of the human body. These gestures constitute forms that are difficult to segment using the instruments that have been used so far in the field of computer vision (image processing). Such instruments favor a segmentation of the image according to the recognizable and static objects it may feature. In order to make it possible to analyze gestures and, more generally, to transform the current ways of segmenting images, the project team intends to work on the concept of “force”, drawing inspiration from the works on painting by Gilles Deleuze and René Thom. This project is also in line with Aby Warburg’s theoretical-practical perspective on the migration of motifs and with Henri Focillon’s work on the genealogy of forms, and it aims to renew the discussion on the relation between contemporary quantitative and qualitative methods supported by computational analysis.