Taught By
István Rév, Blinken OSA Archivum
Course Description
The course intends to explore the specificities, but also the close family relationships of museums and archives (libraries, as well); explore the possibilities, and also the limits of turning words into images, textual documents into visuals. It deals with words, texts, the tension between literal meaning and figurative excesses, with energeia, the active, activating quality of images, the evocative character of both textual documents and artifacts. The class follows a selected history and theory of archives; the utopia of collecting, preserving, and presenting universal knowledge, and the efforts of turning textual documents into visual objects, icons, memorials, monuments, installations, moving images. As Aristotle wrote in Poetics: “A verbal representation was said to be persuasive when it gave the impression that it might have been alive”. Examples and practices inside and outside the archives will be studied as well: visual theology, icons that bleed, excrete oil and tears, the vera icon, merging body and image thus creating the “true image”; the myths and problems of photographic images (the fictional character of images that, however, “does not prevent authorities from iris recognition or the surveillance of every sort of public space.”); map making (cartographic and anatomical); visualization as analytical tool in science; political gestures and propaganda, visualizing notions political statements, mis-(and dis-)information by images; the use of images as forensic evidence and in legal procedure, especially in grave violations of human rights; etc.
Members of the class will face the problems of the difficulties of authenticating (archival) documents; the diminishing credibility and trustworthiness of archival institutions (and the efforts to restore them), the gains and losses (of authenticity, evidentiary value, and authority) of turning textual documents into images; whether documents turned into images make it difficult to grasp the historicity of texts at a time when the division that separated textual from visual traces of events is becoming thinner by the day.
Members of the class (co-taught by members of the Blinken OSA Archivum, István Rév, Katalin Székely, head of the creative programs at OSA, Oksana Sarkisova, head of the Visual Platform at CEU, Csaba Szilágyi, Chief Archivist at OSA, József Bóné, head of the IT department at OSA) will, besides theoretical issues, get acquainted with technologies that make it possible to turn words into images, exhibitions based on archival material, documents and documentary works. The course will include a day-long excursion to the Archive in Budapest, and as a negative demonstration, a visit to the House of Terror.