Blue World Gallery

with Kaja Silverman

The virtual expression of Kaja Silverman's philosophy on Photography and Being. Silverman considers the digital place where artworks live, how they are installed within the screen, and how a viewer must approach looking at them. In the interactive gallery artworks are reconfigurable and group conversations, lectures, and performances can find place. Blue World Gallery is modeled, in part, after the Museo Nacional del Prado, Spain.

Builders: Austin Mayer, AIA, Marcos Hering, Nathan Gassaway, Dingaloo, and Evan Curtis Charles Hall.

Blue World Gallery builds on Kaja Silverman's extensive writings on Photography. Her most recent book, The Miracle of Analogy, is the first installment in a three-volume reconceptualization of photography. Since this book is primarily concerned with photography as the agency through which the world reveals itself to us, it focuses on images in whose formation the photographer played only a nominal role: on the pre-optical camera obscura's image-stream, and photographs made during the first three decades of chemical photography. And although Silverman discusses works by a number of contemporary photographers, they are all close in spirit to the photographs of the nineteenth century photographers who figure most prominently in Miracle: William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

The second volume, The Three-Personed Picture, is about the gradual emergence of a very different kind of image: one that is two-sided, three personnel and authored from inside. It is shaped both by the subjective intelligence of the sitter and the beholder as well as the author, and by the objective intelligence of the world. Through it, the saving power of photography finally became not just ontological, but socio-ontological. The final volume in this trilogy, The Promise of Social Happiness, is focused on the re-emergence of pictorial photography in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, through two closely-related forms: photo-painting, and large-format photography.

Kaja Silverman is an American art historian and critical theorist. She held the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania from 2010-2020. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, and is currently the holder of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

Silverman is the author of nine books: The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (2015); Flesh of My Flesh (2009); James Coleman (2002); World Spectators (2000); Speaking About Godard (with Harun Farocki, 1998); The Threshold of the Visible World (1996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988); and The Subject of Semiotics (1983).

"Virtual stone by virtual stone, this project builds something that does not yet exist: a venue for looking at art together and in so doing, remembering what it means to Be together."

- Kaja Silverman, 2022