Welcome to Afterimage Volume 49, no. 3.
This issue begins with an in-depth interview with artist Guillaume Bijl, conducted by Michaël Amy. As Amy establishes in his thorough contextual introduction, Bijl’s illusionistic installations, which function as trompe l’œil environments, “[take] on big themes—social, economic, political, historical, art historical, cultural, religious—in a highly idiosyncratic way.” In their ensuing conversation, we discover the details of how, in Bijl’s work, the gap between art and life is so often blurred.
Three peer-reviewed articles form the centerpiece of this issue. First, although much has been written about the philosophical questions raised in the television series Westworld, including the nature of consciousness and the function of free will, Henrik Gustafsson focuses his essay in this issue on the confrontation between human beings and living images in the show. Drawing especially from the work of Hans Belting and William Gaddis’s final novel Agapē Agape,...
University of California Press