Remediation and the Epistéme

Remediation and the Epistéme

I’ve attached Giuseppe Castiglione’s View of the Salon Carré in the Louvre (1861) as a means to talk about politics and epistemes. According to Wikimedia “[t]his is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or less” (Castiglione). The binary code of the title of View of the Salon Carré in the Louvre looks like this:

01010110011010010110010101110111 0110111101100110 011101000110100001100101 0101001101100001011011000110111101101110 0100001101100001011100100111001011101001 0110100101101110 011101000110100001100101 010011000110111101110101011101100111001001100101. (“ASCII”)

I retrieved the jpeg (Joint Photographic Experts Group)--a form of image compression--file at my home computer within less than a second from a file on servers in either Tampa, Florida or in Amsterdam. The code makes it possible for networks to bring past political debates into conversation with the present. By way of "remediation" into a binary system, the original painting View of the Salon Carré in the Louvre becomes a topic of this discussion (Bolter 273).

The image attached to this essay came from the thoughts and body actions of Giuseppe Castiglione who placed mixtures of oil paint onto a canvas. The painting was framed and eventually photographed. Perhaps it was printed, and a digital photograph was taken off the print or it was converted immediately into its digital jpeg format by a digital camera. The digital image, uploaded to Wikimedia servers, then arrived on my computer screen which I then printed. Since I live in a liberal climate that allows me to have Internet access, the painting may be taken as a political metaphor for open access to ideas both then and now.

By political I mean how the French Bourgeois period depicted in the image relates to our own concerning the books Remediation (1999) by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, and On the Order of Things (1970) by Michel Foucault. Although the books discussed much that may relate to Castiglione’s oil on canvas, this essay attempts to merge stored information of the painter’s neural activity, captured from the artist’s painting as atoms held in a particular state to represent either a 1 or a 0, as a means of bringing the past into conversation with the reader.

As an example, today’s Louvre makes available stunning videos along with music and narration as information for the viewer to experience the museum as if they are there. (“Un Pastel Spectaculaire”). Parts of the past are now as close as the fingertips. This hyper "immediacy” folds the past into the present and makes possible this essay which in part discusses politics based on the references of a past political climate (Bolter 272-3). It is a hypermedia process because of the way the Internet allows me to gather multitudes of information from links related to a discussion of the political aspects of a work of art. (Bolter 272).

In her article “On the Meaning of Exhibitions – Exhibition Epistèmes in a Historical Perspective” Kerstin Smeds discusses “how scientific epistemologies and discourses, as well as the history of ideas and ideologies, are reflected in the way museums and exhibitions are organized” (“On the Meaning of Exhibitions” 50). She paraphrases Kress/Leeuwen saying that “[a]n exhibition wouldn’t . . . be called only an ‘act of speech’ or a statement or utterance of some hidden (or visible) museal epistemological practice and discourse, but a display of many diverse discourses forming one integrated multimodal ‘text’ and goes on to note that “Episteme II, the Enlightenment prevails” from 1860 onward (Smeds, 55-56). Referring to Castiglione’s painting then we might say that the artist’s “text” comprises the multimodal nature of the Louvre as well as the Enlightenment.

The Moroccan visitors dressed in their turban hats indicates the setting is cosmopolitan. The painting depicts other visitors engaged in intellectual activities or rather, in participation with the interiority of their uniquely defined representations: a woman reading, another painting, two men in conversation, another contemplating a painting. The open door at the far end and the large sky-lit gallery are references to the coming and going of ideas. Aesthetic values are not only within the paintings of the portraits and in the pastoral scene at the rear of the gallery but also being produced by the artists at work. The image is one multimodal collection of acts and messages that define episteme II, a time when liberalism became the discourse of the day.

Similar to Foucault’s ekphrastic description of the artist's salon in On the Order of Things, the painting’s discourse is a realist model of what it might be like to be at the Salon Carré in 1861. It shows France when “the Legislative Body began to publish its debates . . . The Emperor relaxed government censorship and his regime came to be known as the "Liberal Empire" (Bonaparte)

Works Cited

“ASCII Converter - Hex, Decimal, Binary, Base64, and ASCII Converter.” Branah,

https://www.branah.com/ascii-converter. Accessed 8 Oct. 2018.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Reprint edition, The MIT Press, 2000.

Bonaparte Eugenie de Montijo Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte King Napoléon Louis Bonaparte of, et al. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte Historical Plaques and Markers. https://openplaques.org/people/486. Accessed 6 Oct. 2018.

Castiglione, Giuseppe. View of the Grand Salon Carré in the Louvre. 1861 date

QS:P571,+ - -00T00:00:00Z/9 1861. Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giuseppe_Castiglione_-_View_of_the_Grand_Salon_Carr%C3%A9_in_the_Louvre_-_WGA4552.jpg.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Reissue Edition, Vintage, 1994.

“On the Meaning of Exhibitions – Exhibition Epistèmes in a Historical Perspective”.

https://www.designsforlearning.nu/articles/abstract/10.2478/dfl-2014-0004/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2018.

“Un Pastel Spectaculaire.” Focus, 15 May 2017,

https://focus.louvre.fr/fr/la-marquise-de-pompadour/observer/un-pastel-spectaculaire.