The book Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story. In Memory of Alberto Argenton is the winner of the 2024 edition of the prestigious Wolfgang Metzger International Prize.
The prize named after Wolfgang Metzger, a student of Max Wertheimer and one of the leading members of the second generation of the Berlin Gestalt School, is assigned biennially to innovative scientific work that contributes to the research or application of Gestalt theory in the natural sciences, humanities, social and economic sciences, and other fields.
The book Showing time, written by Laura Messina-Argenton, Tiziano Agostini, Tamara Prest, and Ian F. Verstegen, and published by Springer, develops the research conceived and designed by Alberto Argenton to investigate, in a broad sense, the representation of time realized through pictorial media and, specifically, the representation of stories narrated in a continuous mode, that is, stories whose unfolding in more episodes is enclosed in a single image.
Essentially, the study was driven by a primary question: how does the artist solve the problem of narrating a story and its unfolding, the episodes that compose it, which have a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static medium that both perceptually and representationally is distinguished only by spatial sign-elements?
The research was developed by adopting the theoretical framework of Gestalt Psychology, in the tradition followed by Rudolf Arnheim and Argenton himself.
The award will be conferred on September 25, 2024 (in the Sacrestia del Bramante, Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan), during the opening ceremony of the 23rd GTA Conference https://www.gtaconference2024.com/awards