Susan Sontag, E.O. WIlson & Roger Penrose at MIT - Images & Meaning Conference 2001

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[@husseinm.4723]

It was good that Sontag broadened the conversation, to focus on the topic of discussion.

[@KymHammond]

But not enough that she was able to establish her thesis and then pick up on the various nuances of it in the discussions of others.

[@marcoantoniogodinho6439]

All the speakers said beautiful things. But Sontag was the one who really engaged in producing some new knowledge in the audience.

[@aminthereader8946]

Knowledge? Most of what she said was self evidently absurd. In 2003 in her book 'Regarding the Pain of Others' she refuted many of her own arguments she presents here.

[@bobsamuels8570]

​@@aminthereader8946 Perhaps Sontag is not presenting new knowledge but countering and exposing a point of view and offering the concept of alternative ways of viewing as observers. Every true visual artist knows the power of images, the point is to create images that reveal what we do not already know or at least reveal to us what concepts we accept and in ways that reveal to us the observers something about ourselves, our lack of comprehension or the ability to conceive ideas and so on. There are plenty of examples, a good one from the point of the view of society and clothing fashion which changed the world of photography and fashion was David Bailey, who obviously stepped outside the accepted concepts of fashion photography. It's a simple and rather mundane example concerning art and artists as there have been many who have shown the world the multitudes of ways of using images to interpret and understand our world. Yet it is an example of significant change brought on by assaulting preconceived ideas by a creative and open mind. As far as Sontag refuting her ideas, she is in good company, many artists do not approve of their previous work simply because they have moved beyond that. I think that concepts either improve with time or they are discarded, it maybe impossible to know that while you are young..

[@KymHammond]

@@aminthereader8946 to be fair, by late 2004, December in fact, she was dead so it would not be hard to imagine that she saturated in opioids to disguise the pain of the terminal cancer that was eating her alive and feeling she had not yet completed her major life’s projects would begin to retract many of her earlier ideas in the hope of updating then before she died.

[@KymHammond]

@@bobsamuels8570 indeed. But her point wasn’t in the objectivity of artist but rather in the unfamiliar work of Debord, Bauldrillard, etc plus many other continental philosophers that back then wasn’t so broadly familiar in they way they are today some twenty years later in a time accelerated information.

[@armandoribeiro918]

Bs

[@dizmop]

The guys are waffling!!

[@allfieldsrequired1]

I like how Sontag brings the discussion back from "reacting to famous pictures" to the actual topic of the conference. The audience seemed to understand what she was talking about better than the participants.

[@KymHammond]

That was rather odd wasn’t it, the way the two scientists, the neuroscientist and the mathematician, huddled themselves together and kept confirming each other’s position yet seemed completely oblivious to the direction she was unsuccessfully trying to take the discussion. I think her own project, her own thinking on it, wasn’t yet complete, as if she was relying on something obvious about culture and incorrectly thought it was just there under the surface and could easily be evoked and described by simply mentioning a few new concepts. In the end she resorted to only defending her position without making it clear what it was. Part of her problem perhaps was that her initial insight lay in an unfamiliar structuralist and feminist analysis that she hadn’t developed beyond that mainstream visual culture didn’t represent women or include women in the same way. Today we have the internet and particularly over the last twenty years silo-ed social media and two or three generations now of online users that have taken media arts courses and particularly ones that were heavily post modernly influenced to be able to start pulling apart what she was saying and the media space that was evoked at the time. Today we can easily see that but not her and certainly not the other speakers.

[@tribudeuno]

In 2001, photographs were still “events”. I worked in the motion picture industry, and the only people allowed to have cameras were the script supervisor and the prop people, for the purpose of continuity. I have very few photos of me during my 30 year career, and those I have were images taken by those approved to have cameras and then gifted to me. These photos were events, not even digital, they were taken with Polaroid cameras. Since this time of this conference, images have become a glut, in a sense cheapened and become more ephemeral since the majority are digital. Before images were hardcopies, and though also ephemeral they were things that could with care be preserved. With digital images, a hard drive could break, or an EMP could wipe a flash drive, and lost forever. This in a sense renders the whole of 21st Century culture temporary and disposable…

[@dizmop]

A very powerful observation

[@Rodztar13]

Outstanding ❤️

[@shabirmagami146]

brilliant discussion ...thank you

[@TwistedThunderKittie]

Omfg, EO Wilson and Sontag...... wow

[@bella-md1tz]

Susan ate everyone else up 🤣

[@sibtayshaheed5485]

If there are 4 directions and 4 people lets say east, west, north or south. ALL 4 people will meet again if they start a journey from middle point of cross +. The point is important. I mean the starting point of start. Because the end means the same thing. End won't change what is important is the start. So direction is the key.

[@eloiseripley]

I would love to be able to see Rogers face when she said that. Hilarious.

[@user-ql9nw8vp2l]

4:15 nothing is more mysterious or profound than the human mind.

[@karinberryman2009]

Nothing, except the mind of its designer and creator.

[@Paine137]

@@karinberryman2009Evolution is cleverer than you and any fake deity.

[@karinberryman2009]

@@Paine137 😅

[@firouz256]

Men love to listen to themselves! 😂 I needed someone of the Camilla Paglia caliber to make this discussion bearable!

[@dpq06]

Those students must be incredibly intelligent and talented people and it's sad that they all seem to have such shallow, dismissive interpretations of the concept at hand.

[@KymHammond]

To be fair, we are talking about a twenty year gap between the world then and a very much more culturally and political literate audience of today.

[@sattarabus]

Cognitively heavy-duty discussion explicitly on the visual but implicitly on the scribal/verbal universe. An image whether simple or complex is liable to framing, angle, context, intentionality and accident. It can predispose, represent, dictate, distort, occlude, even obscure, meaning. In the beginning was the Word that begot a series of images. A caption can belie the uvula in the split open mouth as vulva with the clitoris. A demanding video that dusts and tones up your cerebral grid. The synergy of physicist, myrmecologist, and littérateur results in a piquant menu of food for thought. Feast on it slowly.

[@willmercury]

Ugh. An unctuous pudding that clots the mind like a horse-shit sock lodged in the glottis.

[@straighttalking2090]

This would be a very useful tool to those who want or need to get some sleep. Turn the volume and brightness down low - go to bed, close your eyes and give it 15 minutes.

[@simperingham]

I can’t believe how embarrassing Penrose is, at least in his opening remarks so far. It’s as though he’s in high school making up a speech for debate class on the spot. Maybe it’s just not his field, but he managed to waffle on nothingness for several minutes. Of course it makes sense that Sontag would try to save him by blaming the images they’ve been given.

[@robertyoung1777]

Art for art’s sake. Music for music’s sake. I don’t want anyone interpreting the artworks or music I experience.

[@straighttalking2090]

On a scale from watching paint dry to watching a good movie - this is closest to the former.

[@rangecow]

I like Sontag but am not sure what she's saying other than that the images are cliches. She seems to be in a bad mood. Wilson is accommodating, coming off as more interesting than I'd have expected. And now, the final words of the host: the photos aren't cliches.

[@Ventaniacorre]

Susan Sontag was a monster

[@ayushsadotra9426]

By Aeon Magazine ;-)

[@jackpavlik563]

In what way?

[@kkhushkkhush9892]

yes she is...and the world needs more such monsters today.

[@bettyimages4788]

monster as in she is always in beast mode :^)

[@willmercury]

@@bettyimages4788 Hagiography.

[@TwistedThunderKittie]

sontag always looks bored and annoyed and wishes she wasn't there.

[@AliNaderzad]

That’s a lot of fruit

[@armandoribeiro918]

Que mulher chata.....

[@woodwork5574]

Penrose just revealed his ignorance concerning when life begins.It can only be at conception.then the process of life begins.In this process it is never not life.It is always a human life. Yes it is that simple.

[@juancpgo]

Susan Sontag spends so much energy getting offended about everything that she can't put a coherent thought together.

[@dpq06]

I think she isn't offended, just disappointed and frustrated that the reaction from a room of outrageously intelligent people are so quick to dismiss what is a simply a novel interpretation of an aspect of everyday life. No one was interested in learning or a socratic discussion, they miss the whole point of the idea at hand by insisting on the easiest answer which is just shocking and sad to see from a place like MIT.

[@KymHammond]

@@dpq06 think it was more to do with the time and how familiar people were with essentially continental philosophical ideas. Perhaps they were largely there for the science, which put her off.

[@simperingham]

I would have been offended if I got to such an event on the importance of the image and had to listen to Penrose treat it like free association time.

[@lizbenny7199]

@@simperingham lmaooooo

[@edwardjones2202]

Typical: Scientist makes the most of it and uses the images to make a few sensible remarks Literary person: waffles philosophically and pretentiously. Strains to take a contrarian position because the contrarian position is of course the smartest one.

[@edwardjones2202]

@@ViktoriaLove93 definitely your fault you mistake obscurity for depth, or graft some rough approximation of what she's saying onto her muddled and imprecise expressions, and call it "understanding".

[@bettyimages4788]

​@@edwardjones2202 dude i'm really sorry that Sontag's words flew over your head and i'm really sorry that you think an MIT panel discussion on Images & Meaning ( this was basically a retrospective view on photographic/pictorial representation of scientific achievement in the 20th century ) is a good time for scientists to "make a few sensible remarks" that just ammount to vague reactions and opinions.... but i have to agree with @Viktoriaap7. The topic is images and meaning and she's literally the only one who addressed it instead of just pointing to the image and being like, "that's a fetus, let's talk about fetuses," rather than sontag's choice to pivot back to the topic at hand, which was a the bigger picture- in other words, the system of representation in which we live and which originated these images. come on man.

[@jaspreetsingh-wl2tj]

@Betty Images I agree. Scientists (along with many of the question askers/commentors at the end) were demonstrating the relationship between the image and the meaning, as multiple meanings came into existence through them mediated by their particular mental context. But as the host said "they can give their spontaneous response or reaction", I think it was just fine for them to say what the images represented to them. However, I must say that Susan Sontag did enrich the discussion by her comment, as she mentioned that images don't mean anything (or 'very little' in her words) without the context, they are just dots of colors - which is the same with written word (Referring to Sir Roger Penrose's comment about being nothing fundamentally different in how one derives meaning from images as opposed to words), as you need the context composed of the meaning of words in order to understand what is being said. In case anyone finds this useful. This reminds of mathematical structuralism, in which a mathematical object does not obtain its meaning, its identity, from what it is, but from how it relates to all other objects in the context. For example, take the natural numbers 0,1, 2.... and so on. In a particular language such as the language of set theory, there multiple ways of defining natural numbers. As sets, 0 of one definition may not be a zero in another. However, what makes a set 0 is its place in the 'structure' of natural numbers. Now, I'm no expert in the topics discussed in the discussion, it seems same could also be true of images - like the person who saw energy in the picture which was apparently of the atomic bomb - that was the meaning given to the picture by the location where the observer placed it in their mental context. An alien seeing the atomic explosion may give it an entirely different meaning - may focus on entirely different angle.

[@bezuayehushimshak620]

@@bettyimages4788 impressed.. well done 🤘🤘

[@bezuayehushimshak620]

@Edward jones You are correct... But why?... If you understood the situation you wouldn't have said that.