Hello Avatar Rise Of The Networking Generation Analysis

In Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, author Beth Coleman writes about how our ubiquity of access to new technologies in the visual field are continually changing “how we see” and thus changing “who we are (how we see ourselves)” (Coleman 53). I cite Coleman’s point that technical changes in perspective can stimulate changes in human perception. When applied to portraiture’s evolving processes and uses, it is clear how it has consistently given a face to the abstract or untouchable. The arc of this growing flexibility of perception is apparent when juxtaposing the Daguerreotype portrait of Frederick Douglas (1847), Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Self-Portrait (1967) and Juliana Huxtable’s ink-jet photograph titled Untitled in the Rage …show more content…
Douglas’s portrait socially negated the daguerreotype’s aesthetics by harnessing its virtual potential with counter-aesthetics. Douglas’s portrait represents the progression towards image as a means to display new social identity. Warhol’s is emblematic of the crisis of the identity loss that preceded Postmodernism, and Huxtable’s self-portrait presents “self” as a network- a network where an identity’s different contingencies bump heads and are forced to interact—the self-portrait turns into a sort of breeding ground. The subsistence of each self-portrait is “not self-sustaining or coherent within itself, not a pure, unidirectional show of individual agency, but always contingent on otherness” (Jones 971). Each portrait, regardless of their different historical contexts, requires a fleshing out of their represented and embodied subject through viewer …show more content…
Portraiture allows her to illuminate and disperse an “emerging identity in which categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and age are fluid and open” ("The New Museum 's Triennial Forecasts a Bleak Future"). Natural elements of the human figure presented unnaturally. Her Body is painted in noxious shades of violet and green presenting the viewer with a corporeal field that orbits human form and figure. The neon skin pushes the visibility already inherent in being a gay, trans, African-American female. Huxtable presents herself as an anamorphic subject of photography and thereby displaces the specular subject of reflexive self-conscious. Anamorphic here refers to twisting in the field of vision that becomes constitutive of the subject of the gaze. Her portrait is not to be reduced to an exhibition of an exotic curiosity. The background, composed of what appears to be a slanting yellowish ground and a white circle in the top right corner of the light blue sky, bares enough resemblance to the spatial structures that dictate the “real” further pressing its virtual