Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s intimate photo-memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

: In this paper, I look at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engage in a critical dialogue with an assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir. In doing this I draw on Hannah Arendt’s take on narratives as tangible traces of uniqueness and plurality, political traits par excellence in the cultural histories of the human condition. Being aware of my role as a reader/viewer/interpreter of a woman artist’s auto/biographical narratives, I move beyond dilemmas of representation or questions of unveiling “the real Leonard”. The artist is instead configured as a narrative persona, whose narratives respond to three interrelated themes of inquiry, namely the visualization of spatial technologies, vulnerability and the gendering of memory. Key words: gendered memories, narrative persona, spatial technologies, photo memoir, vulnerability

Cosmic Topologies of Imitation: From the Horror of Digital Autotoxicus to the Auto-Toxicity of the Social

This article expands on an earlier concept of horror autotoxicus linked to digital contagions of spam and network Virality.1 It aims to present, as such, a broader conception of cosmic topologies of imitation (CTI) intended to better grasp the relatively new practices of social media marketing. Similar to digital autotoxicity, CTI provide the perfect medium for sharing while also spreading contagions that can potentially contaminate the medium itself. However, whereas digital contagions are perhaps limited to the toxicity of a technical layer of information viruses, the contagions of CTI are an all pervasive auto-toxicity which can infect human bodies and technologies increasingly in concert with each other. This is an exceptional autotoxicus that significantly blurs the immunological line of exemption between self and nonself, and potentially, the anthropomorphic distinction between individual self and collective others.