Category: academic research

  • AI Art in Fredrik Jameson’s Postmodern World

    An art competition at a US state fair stirred the entire art world last September. The winning entry, ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’, a work by Jason Allen created through Midjourney, sparked conversations online (mostly on the side of disapproval and/or alarm) about the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create art. In a rather simplistic and…

  • Guillermo’s Wind of Change

    It was 1981 when art critic Alice Guillermo published Endaya’s Wind of Change at the Observer magazine, a weekly supplement of The Times Journal. At that time, she was already an established art critic; from bagging the Art Association of the Philippines’ Art Criticism Award in 1976, to having her byline in multiple publications. It…

  • Illusion of lenticular printing and faith healing in Barrio Sagrado

    In Barrio Sagrado, Veejay Villafranca ventures to explore the different facets of Filipino faith through his lens. The impetus that launched this long-term project was personal: a newspaper clipping about his grandfather who was plausibly poisoned by a faith healer. In the 70s, journalist Vic Villafranca went to Baguio for an assignment to uncover psychic…

  • Artists as ‘memoryscapers’: Using the archives as construction sites [Excerpt]

    In Jimerson’s imagery of the archives as a restaurant, the customer is a researcher served by a staff acting in front and behind the kitchen that is the archives. He elaborated the metaphor by imagining that “[t]he researcher remains in the dining room, as a consumer of information, while the most important work of the…

  • Finding Tasing [Excerpt]

    Finding Tasing [Excerpt]

    I found Tasing when I went over the first three volumes of Purita Kalaw-Ledesma’s digitized scrapbooks, dense with news clippings and other ephemera about art. I had to physically visit the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation Inc. (KLFI) in Makati to use their newly-fixed computer for researchers because at least here in the Philippines, the only way access…

  • Certified Copy: Ambiguous authenticities moving in time and space

    Certified Copy: Ambiguous authenticities moving in time and space

    In Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film Certified Copy, British author James Miller (played by William Shimell) wrote a book of the same title (i.e. Certified Copy) which has echoes of Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay on mechanical reproduction. In Miller’s words, his intention is “to try and show that the copy itself has worth in that leads…

  • Forming Philippine Identity Behind American Lens: 1904 World’s Fair and Thereafter

    Abstract: This paper explores the effect of photography during American colonial rule in the Philippines which led to the massive popularity of the Philippine anthropological exhibition in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Though Filipinos were already brought in to be displayed in the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, it received a lesser…