Dez 3, 2007

Lecture: Richard Weihe: The Face and Its Double – Aspects of the Mask

Date: Dez 3, 2007, 19:00 Uhr

Duration: Dez 3, 2007

Location: Akademie Schloss Solitude

For the Romans, persona was an actor’s “mask” or “role”. In the alternating of entrance and exit, of being observed (onstage) and being unobserved (offstage), persona is a protected playing field in which the actor puts himself on display for an audience. The actor’s confrontation with the audience, the conscious exposing-oneself-to-the-other, is the crucial criteria of the theater. Only the theater? The mask can serve as a kind of mind map to consider fundamental termini like individuality and identity in the area of tension between philosophical conceptualism and cultural practice. We run up against the paradox that a person needs others to become identical to himself; to bring the face and its double under cover.

Richard Weihe’s “lecture performance” considers itself an interplay between discourse and representation. Hans Belting concludes the evening by illuminating scientific/visual aspects of person(a).

Richard Weihe is a lecturer at the University of Witten/Herdeck and works as a freelance author and translator. In the last winter semester, he was a senior fellow at the IFK in Vienna; in 2006/7 he was an art, science & business fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. His Die Paradoxie der Maske. Die Geschichte einer Form (The Paradox of the Mask. The History of a Form) explores the cultural history of the mask (2004).

Hans Belting is considered one of visual media science’s founders. Until recently he was the director of the IFK in Vienna; prior to this he was a professor for Artistic Science and Media Theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. His most recent publications are Das echte Bild. Bildfragen und Glaubensfragen (The Real Image: Questions of Pictures and Belief) (2005) and Bildfragen. Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch (Questions of Images: The Sciences of Visual Media in Transition) (2007).

With actors Tobias Graupner and Sarah Kempin.

The art, science & business program was made possible with the financial support of the Baden-Württemberg State Foundation, the City of Stuttgart as well as LBBW Foundation for Art and Culture.

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