Against the current :: Emilie Houssa

Waves of images, floods of pixels, networks of signs: it would be so easy to go with the flow, to drift along with the assertion that we live in an “image-oriented society.”   But this eleventh issue of .dpi is less focused on riding that wave than it is on softening it, on containing it, or at the very least on taking the time to examine it for what it is.   The articles and columns in this issue prove to be ideas and projects that go against the current of images around us.   They question these images, these signs and symbols, these pictures that stick in our minds after they are gone and the ones that make us look twice.   How much influence do these images have in our lives?   To what extent do they limit us, these images that pretend, with their global visibility, to do away with barriers?   Can they be used as a means of subversion against the institutionalized system?   Can these mutable and volatile images throw into uncertainty even the concept of physical presence?   Because to be everywhere for “everyone” all the time is to disappear, to become invisible.   The articles in this issue grasp at these passing images even as they flicker by.

To seize each square centimeter of flash and gloss that make up our magazines, that adorn the walls of our cities and that settle in our thoughts like dust.   To grab even the merest pixel, a flash of video that flickers across the screens of our computers and televisions.   To seize them and then to look closer: this is the impending challenge, the unending road that you are being invited to walk.

Paule Mackrous, Morvary Samare and Børrea Schau-Larsen are devoted to the image of woman in everyday life, or rather to images of women that inhabit us and those that haunt us.   Paule's work is based on her travels to Bucharest, and on the immense advertisements emblazoned with women plastered across the buildings of that city. Mobility, inseparable from the act of traveling, is what allows us to see those things that are so commonplace that they are rendered invisible.   On the polished surface of these images, Paule constructs a discerning analysis of the place and presence of women in a modernizing Romania. In contrast to these women being displayed for profit, Promise Land , the video project by Morvary Samare and Børrea Schau-Larsen, sheds light on concealed women, victims of the global trade of human trafficking, for whom the disappearance of borders only makes the loss of identity more assured.

Further along in this exploration of the image, Maryse Gagné and Lorella Abenavoli undertake a theoretical examination of the act – both mental and artistic – of representing. Maryse's offering, imagines agents , touches on the ancient rhetoric of ars memoria , or the art of memory, a concept that she incorporated into her visual arts teaching projects.   Her historical odyssey is also a journey into our own memory, the structure of which forms the basis for the Internet (the ultimate journey for the memory in our society?). Lorella, for the guest column, addresses the concept of representation in art and the many different possibilities that can be revealed by an artistic work.   Using the project Genesis by Eduardo Kac, shown at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal during the exposition E-art that marked the ten-year anniversary of the Langlois Foundation, Lorella presents a personal reflection that calls into question the very act of representing.   This theme, seemingly so closely linked with the artistic field, challenges several principals whose truth we take for granted.

Columns by Esther Guzman and Sophie Le-Phat Ho grapple with the signs and images surrounding us that we are socialized to identify as normal or deviant. We have long since stopped paying attention to the signs and logos that are the focus of Esther's feminist column, at least with our conscious minds, and yet they burden us with images and with predetermined identities. Addressing different genres and preconceived notions, Esther invites us with images and words to rethink the social modes of representation that alienate us into leading closed lives. Finally, in the current events column, Sophie invites us to take a closer look at pornographic images, so easily vilified and/or categorized, but which can often be representative of subversive behaviour.   For example, Sharing is Sexy (SIS) is a sex-friendly collective, started by artistic and activist groups in San Diego, that maintains a website/open source porn laboratory.

I would like to thank the Editorial Committee and more especially Marianne Cloutier and Mélina Bernier for their precious help.

Traduction : Ellen Warketin