Our Selfies, Our Selves: The "Self" in Self-Portraiture

The second of the Centre for Culture and Technology’s fellows’ lectures is taking place on Thursday, 6pm, at the Coach House. It will feature Nicole Morse, of Florida Atlantic and author of the wonderful recent Duke volume, Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art. They’re trained as a cinema scholar. Registration is not necessary.

Who is the “self” in self-portraiture? Through close readings and phenomenological description of Francisco González Rosas (our 2022-23 Artist in Residence)'s work, Dr. Nicole Morse (2022-23 External Faculty Fellow) explores the intersubjective address of self-portraiture and the way viewers are solicited, positioned, invited, and excluded from the image. Following Levinas, Dr Morse argues that neither the self of the artist nor the self of the viewer is best understood through narcissism, even as each is engaged in an encounter with the self. Through self-portraiture, the self emerges as fundamentally relational, vulnerable, and precarious, an insight that is particularly powerful and necessary amid rising fascist movements across the globe.

Our Selfies, Our Selves is a 4-part lecture series that brings together our Artist in Residence and three Faculty Fellows to engage the Artist's work with our annual theme—Our Selfies, our Selves—to offer critical accounts of technologies of the self.