Raymond Drainville Presentation

Abstract: Late in his career, the art historian Aby Warburg introduced the concept of the "iconology of the interval", based not upon the discursive understanding of figures, but instead upon those figures' poses and their interrelationships with their surrounding environments. These poses and interrelationships become critical factors in the understanding of their respective subjects: they come to seem the “natural” way to depict them. Whilst Warburg was focused on the Italian Renaissance, significant evidence suggests this is a common artistic strategy, that it has been adopted by many photographers, and that it informs the public understanding of subject matter.

Using this form of iconology as an inspiration, I employ artificial intelligence to cluster imagery from a mid-size dataset collected from Twitter during the height of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in 2015. I then manually assemble thematic clusters portraying refugees in photographs and illustrations.

Bio:  Raymond Drainville teaches digital design, UX, and media theory in Canada at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. His background includes degrees in visual studies, the history of art, and information studies; prior to getting his PhD in 2018, he also ran a web development and graphic design agency in the UK for about 15 years. His research focuses on the interpretation and use of imagery, particularly on digital platforms, and he connects these to the history of making images.