How might the supernatural be represented in religious paintings that imply continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This article examines how a number of Italian paintings employ strategies for representing the supernatural through displacement devices that create a ‘gap’ within perception – an inviolable space that is implied as being outside normal spatiotemporal relations. The contention is (...) that these distancing devices are dependent on an imagined spatial proximity that is established but then broken. They exploit inherent ambiguities as to where a painting is relative to its beholder, by means of withholding both perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work. (shrink)

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by (...) /cloud/ and by the nature of the image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit. (shrink)