VCM

10Story

22 January 2010

Agent

Posing Questions: Being & image in Europe & Asia

Contents
- Introduction
- The sections
     * Agent
     * Role
     * Person
     * Mind
- The panels
     * Optical character recognition?
     * Vernacular parallels
     * Modernist Politics
     * Show & Tell                                                        - Acknowledgements

Agent

The power of any portrait depends in part on the agency of objects and the importance of subjective, emotional and imaginative dimensions of everyday life.

Any object or representation – not just those resembling human beings – can act as an agent to extend its user’s social influence. Based on perception or imagination, the artwork is communicated in gesture, sound, or in graphic or three-dimensional form. To work as an agent of its user, however, the object depends on shared understandings and expectations.
Sometimes certain objects, animals or imagined entities are treated as social persons possessing intentionality. Portraits can also seem uncannily ‘alive’.

Routine in the past, this practice is radically at odds with modernist rationalism. Yet such behaviour is still widespread, not least in apparently modernist societies where the dominant mindset usually dismisses it with embarrassed amusement or sentimentalises it as children’s entertainment.