The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag talk given by renee hoogland (Professor, English) on the topic "The Other Side of Nowhere;".

Abstract: The loss of the “aura” of the artwork has been bemoaned since Walter Benjamin announced its disappearance in the modern age of mechanical reproduction. Several decades later, Roland Barthes restored the aura to the analog technical image by endowing it with the power to produce a trace, the co-presence of a subject and a surface reality. The digital image is often assumed to have destroyed this last remnant of an “authentic” reality by throwing representation per se into crisis. I argue against this narrative of loss. Instead, I explore ways in which the digital image actualizes visibility where none was before, in particular in the realm of aesthetic production and its reception, in the domain of art in its “worlding” functions. My focus is on the work of Michigan artist Cynthia Greig, especially two sets of digital photographs shot in art galleries and museums across the US and Europe that fundamentally reorganize the relationship between the subject and object of artistic visuality and the field of aesthetic perception as such.