IMACTIS · Fostering Critical Identities Through Social Media Archival Images

Fostering Critical Identities Through Social Media Archival Images

The project "IMACTIS - Fostering Critical Identities Through Social Media Archival Images" aimed to analyze identity-related images on social networks (YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Facebook) and to propose a set of critical strategies for citizens and other social actors for building identity narrations while taking advantage of the specific resources of visual languages. The two conceptual and methodological cores that animated the project concern, on the one hand, the disciplines of visual semiotics and rhetoric, both engaged in the effort to overcome the verbo-centric approach to the study of images, and, on the other hand, the concept of archive, which was used as a filter to make a comparison between different types of image collections with respect to the construction, representation, and transformation of identities on social networks. The first disciplinary effort was to move beyond the “broadcast” approaches to the study of images. These approaches range from art history to media studies and art aesthetics, and are characterized by their almost exclusive study of images produced by artists or professionals, while the remainder of visual productions are most often collected under the label of 'amateur images', forming a heterogeneous and undervalued subgroup. In contrast, IMACTIS rather proposes a semio-rhetorical approach, because all social actors - citizens, institutions, and of course also professionals and artists - produce and disseminate images on a daily basis on social networks, giving rise to various communicational frameworks in which different communities, different rhetorical purposes, different genres, and different “visual dialects” are developed, each with its own specificity. This is why IMACTIS has brought into dialogue semiotics, rhetoric, media studies, image sciences, and some elements of computer science in order to examine the expressive and social diversity of image production and dissemination. As for the concept of the archive, its heuristic value concerns both the collections of images disseminated on a daily basis on social networks and the ability to compare them with images produced in the past. Digital encoding has in fact made it possible for the first time to access collections of contemporary images that are disseminated and exchanged every day by all social actors. The concept of archive has been used to compare contemporary image collections on social networks – in their genres and particularities – with images from the past and from different societal domains (photographic and pictorial art, cinema). This project also analyzed a heterogeneous set of image corpora: a corpus of found footage videos in which identity is both constructed and narrativized through the languages of images and in particular of archival footage, notable cases of identity narrations on social networks, and the tradition of the portrait in photographic and pictorial art.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз