Reconfiguring the Portrait

Abraham Geil, Toma Jirsa

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English

Edinburgh University Press
01 August 2025

Theory of art; Portraits in art; Film, TV & Radio; Philosophy: aesthetics; Graphical & digital media applications

Series: Technicities

This collection of essays presents a new multidisciplinary perspective on portraiture in the era of post-digital media.

This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media

literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces

the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.

As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation.

Edited by: Abraham Geil, Toma Jirsa
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781399525084
ISBN 10: 1399525085
Series: Technicities
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 01 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Abraham Geil is Senior Lecturer in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, where he directs the MA Program in Film Studies, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). His research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical theory, aesthetics, and film studies, with a focus on the history of film theory. He is the co-editor of Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). His recent articles can be found in journals such as Novel, Polygraph, World Picture, Paragraph, and Screen, as well as in edited collections on the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Jacques Ranciere.

Reviews for Reconfiguring the Portrait

Some studies of the portrait are portraits of their subject, describing a singular thing in detail. This is not such a book. Geil and Jirsa have instead built a kaleidoscope, encased the portrait in its reflecting surfaces, and allowed their contributors to rotate it into motion, yielding ever-changing views of the portrait as a generative operation--of form, thought, abstraction, time, and media itself.-- ""Eugenie Brinkema, Massachusetts Institute of Technology""