In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lie in the photographers’ love for their...
moreIn a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lie in the photographers’ love for their subjects based in an unexpressed but significant ecological orientation. This analysis leads towards a critical reconsideration of the concept of ‘mass image’, a term developed to describe the production and management of a collective database of imagery uploaded to social media platforms. The article criticises the idea that this mass image is single and unified. Developing ideas of love and fantasy, the article argues that, in an era when the unconscious is structured not like language but like code, massed image databases lack a single present time, with consequences for photographic aesthetics.
"We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas,...
more"We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's informatio explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.
About the Author"
OPEN ACCESS Link below From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure of the COP conferences places everyone face to face with just such a terminal event – very possibly the same event that has...
moreOPEN ACCESS Link below
From the point of view of the colonized, the catastrophe already happened. The failure of the COP conferences places everyone face to face with just such a terminal event – very possibly the same event that has never ceased since 1492. The challenge is to survive, and to make media and culture, after the end
Chapter from Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds), The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice, Routledge/American Film Institute, 2012: 277-296.
Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book...
moreNarrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book features a terrific range of writing ...
“Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical media (radio, film, rotary press, photography) and more recently with electronic media (video, electronic music, digital arts). With benefit of...
more“Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical media (radio, film, rotary press, photography) and more recently with electronic media (video, electronic music, digital arts). With benefit of hindsight it became doctrine that all forms of art were media (Greenberg’s and McLuhan’s different historical versions of medium specificity); that all media were digital (Kittler) and – in what may well be the hegemonic idea of the 21st century – that all human activity, even all ecological activity, has always been fundamentally communicative; that we have been able to conceive of an aesthetic without medium. No matter that the substitute – the concept, especially in anti-retinal art – is in many respects a discrete medium embedded in the entrails of late 20th century theories of language. This article first proposes this diagnosis, then sets out to decipher why the contradictions of art and technology, and more broadly of science and the social, have brought us to this conjuncture, and what kind of opportunity it presents for the (re)making of both arts and media.
Where does the medium in contemporary art begin and end? How can a work that uses technologies be distinguished from one that does not? What cases can be linked to the specific field of art and technology and which cannot? The answers to...
moreWhere does the medium in contemporary art begin and end? How can a work that uses technologies be distinguished from one that does not? What cases can be linked to the specific field of art and technology and which cannot?
The answers to these questions are not the ones commonly imagined and widely bandied about – the common belief that there is no longer any sense in referring to art and technology. We believe that the point of the question is precisely the opposite: today it is necessary, more than ever, to gain a clear understanding of what is meant by art and technology precisely because the boundary between technologies and life have dissolved. Studying the work of artists who operate in this field enables us to acquire vital tools for interpreting our hyper-technological society and grasp the explosive potential of their lateral thinking, including the field of technological and scientific research.
Supply chains connect materials with manufacture and assembly, with consumers and ultimately with disposal. Materials, manufacture and governance of goods and services are further complicated by the circuits of materials, energy and waste...
moreSupply chains connect materials with manufacture and assembly, with consumers and ultimately with disposal. Materials, manufacture and governance of goods and services are further complicated by the circuits of materials, energy and waste that cycle through them. This chapter focuses on the logistical infrastructure of cinema production and distribution, taking examples from device fabrication, globally distributed film production, containerised and streaming distribution, and the imbrication of cinema with financialisation. The failure of COP26 and, it is argued, of capital as a whole to deal with its destructive tendency forces ecocriticism to look more closely at the global trade in media devices, infrastructures, labour and content. Economic policies as much as creativity drive the “global studio” that is now the networked source and destination of film production. Thus far, ecology and economics have been deadly enemies. Can cinema provide a way to overcome their mutual suicide pact?
Narrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book...
moreNarrative edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, is a weighty and extremely worthwhile book from BFI publishing that not only contributes to, but in many ways maps, that criss-crossed field prosaically indicated by its name. The book features a terrific range of writing ...
Iron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective suit, and from his friends, family, and romantic interest by the conviction that he is dying as a result of the suit itself. While Tony Stark...
moreIron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective suit, and from his friends, family, and romantic interest by the conviction that he is dying as a result of the suit itself. While Tony Stark performs the role of billionaire playboy, Iron Man perceives the world in a doubled form, as perspectival image and as data diagrams in his heads-up display. The chapter gives a brief history of data visualisation, the most important visual language since perspective and now more dominant, to seek out the difficulty of being human in isolation, and at a moment when regimes for understanding the world are in flux. The chapter includes a discussion of the fictional inventor as a paragon of a mythical form of labour, and traces his construction to a new version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, engaging Stark in competition with his AI.
Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existence. In the opening sequence, this ambivalent existence is echoed in the mix of digital and physical effects. Discussion of this ambivalence...
moreOblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existence. In the opening sequence, this ambivalent existence is echoed in the mix of digital and physical effects. Discussion of this ambivalence leads into an analysis of nonidentity versus identity, especially in a critical sequence in which clone Jack watches and is observed by a fish. Themes of individualism raised in the chapter on Iron Man return here in more complex form as Jack oscillates among individuality, fidelity to a model, and species-being. This is the third film in a row which raises issues of debt and obligation through the trope of a character who is dead, dying, or reborn, a theme of posthumous existence in this case posed as the only alternative to an absent community.
Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual...
moreThrough an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.
In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of "new media" and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the...
moreIn Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of "new media" and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the field, focusing on the materials of history -- the materials through which the past is mediated. Drawing on the tools of media archaeology and the history and philosophy of media, they propose a new materialist media art history. The contributors consider the idea of history and the artwork's moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future -- how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts. These essays, written from widely diverse critical perspectives, capture a dynam...
B1 - Research Book Chapter
Since the explosion of cartography in the European expansion of the 15th century, globalisation in its many variants has always depended on media, but it has also pictured and otherwise visualised the media of its planetary reach, and...
moreSince the explosion of cartography in the European expansion of the 15th century, globalisation in its many variants has always depended on media, but it has also pictured and otherwise visualised the media of its planetary reach, and very often done so in imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise. Through an overview of historical medals, logos, stamps, poems, paintings and engravings, the paper focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologise and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The paper serves as a genealogy of internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.
The avant-garde blues of Captain Beefheart appeared out of the psychedelic moment in popular music, his career spanning the period of transition from AM pop to FM alternative rock radio in the USA, and the rise of pirate and then...
moreThe avant-garde blues of Captain Beefheart appeared out of the psychedelic moment in popular music, his career spanning the period of transition from AM pop to FM alternative rock radio in the USA, and the rise of pirate and then commercial and public service pop radio in Europe. Relatively unsuccessful commercially, Beefheart was a cult for hardcore fans and musicians. Among his unusual qualities was a powerful commitment to environmentalist themes in his songs and interviews. While individual songs by more popular artists raised such themes, especially about the threat of nuclear war and concerns about pesticides and air pollution, Beefheart was out on a limb musically, lyrically and politically. This chapter traces the curious concatenations of ecopolitics with dictatorial attitudes ascribed to Beefheart by members of his band; and the relations between his debts to African American traditions in music and the environmental themes of so many of his compositions.
This note traces the development of Virilio’s ecological thought from the early Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles into his late writing in The University of Disaster to see how his talismanic concepts increased in resolution and...
moreThis note traces the development of Virilio’s ecological thought from the early Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles into his late writing in The University of Disaster to see how his talismanic concepts increased in resolution and angle of vision over the transition from the later 20th to the early 21st centuries.
This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern...
moreThis Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and refraction, is key to the advent of screen-based media (LCD TVs, computers and mobile devices) and thus how we perceive, image and imagine the world. As such, liquid crystals as a ‘phase of matter’ are epochal. But more than this because, while the emergence of such a brave new world is manifestly contemporary and their ‘discovery’ is comparatively recent (1888), the very fact of liquid crystals goes back at least 4.5 billion years: water, for instance, is crystalline and thus our planet, our ecology and we ourselves are always already liquid crystal. Such a self-evident but under-acknowledged fact, discerned and foregrounded superbly by E...
Cinema, after all, came rather late. Photography gives us the most apt descriptions of the phenomena of the opening of the twentieth century, especially the globalisation of the city. The photograph is not only the possibility of...
moreCinema, after all, came rather late. Photography gives us the most apt descriptions of the phenomena of the opening of the twentieth century, especially the globalisation of the city. The photograph is not only the possibility of identification, of identity constituted through the disciplines of policing; it is also the possibility of anonymity, of interchangeability between all the images in the archive. It is far closer to universality than cinema too, on the global scale: if not defining, it is the characteristic medium of our century, the one that is coming to an end.
Susan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse...
moreSusan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse video of weather patterns captured by web cam over the course of an entire year, atmospheric effects assume the quality of translucent washes that blur distinctions between opacity and transparency, painting and technology. Aerial views of built environments set against expansive cityscapes present essential imagery for large-format digital woodblock prints realized in monochromatic tonals and saturated grids of yellow and blazing orange. Some combine undulating wood grain patterns with pinhole perforations to admit light; others consist of diaphanous walnut stains applied to hand-crafted paper, a self-referential allusion to art’s planarity and permeable membrane. The evanescence of these views is echoed in pristine impressions of filtered dust and shimmering milkweed assemblages contained in Plexiglas light boxes. Known as Asclepias, milkweed is an herbaceous flower named by Carl Linnaeus after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, due to its efficacious medicinal powers. Like the weather, the milkweed’s reflective silver filaments respond to shifting currents of air paired with gently wafted treetops projected in the viewing room. Here pearls of light corresponding to the spheres and pinpricks of the prints on the walls float randomly over the fictitious frame of a cubical vitrine. Orbs appear and disappear amid nocturnal shadows as figments of the imagination, their languid dispersion eliciting not-ofthis-world sensations of suspension, ascent and transcendence. This joined to the mesmerizing stillness of a gallery pierced occasionally by the sound of supersonic aircraft, a reminder of the machine in the garden. Beyond, the history of landscape photography and the Romantic sublime are encoded in works titled “Old Stand” that render minuscule figures of stationary box photographers against the grandeur of ice-capped Rockies. In some of the works the human figure is effaced as a historical memory through exquisitely modulated rubbings whose unbounded spatiality contrasts with the reflexive interiority of the viewing room. Campbell’s incandescent vision of nature asserts the phenomenal power of art to elevate the human spirit in the presence of heart-stirring beauty. It dares to reaffirm the timeless union between the material and immaterial substance of the universe, between human life and the ephemera of the natural world. f i l m
Contemporary digital formalism emerges in the concept of ‘beautiful data’ (Halpern 2015), the visualization of information in intrinsically pleasing patterns which may or may not also provide useful ways of using the data. Data...
moreContemporary digital formalism emerges in the concept of ‘beautiful data’ (Halpern 2015), the visualization of information in intrinsically pleasing patterns which may or may not also provide useful ways of using the data. Data visualization is now both big business and a ubiquitous feature of digital arts and the aesthetic of the ‘postdigital’. It is also a privileged vehicle for the mimetic impulse to re-enter contemporary aesthetic practice, and it is this new formalist mimesis that forms the focus of this chapter.
... Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England Page 7. To Alison Ripley Page 8. Page 9. Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Video Media xi Part I Theory 1 ...
This essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the...
moreThis essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the relation of the economics of growth, built-in obsolescence and product life cycles with the complex determinations of telecommunications governance in relation to the physical environment of megacities. It argues that an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ must be integrated into considerations of both ecological critique and analyses of telecommunications infrastructure and business practice.
This paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture...
moreThis paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture and political economy in the formation of the provision and use of electric light. The essay looks at the marketization of electric power, at outages in the eastern and western US megacities, at the collapse of the public utility model and chaotic implementation of market models in Mumbai, Lagos and other poor megacities, and concludes that while theft of power provides a temporary solution, abandoning centralized market models in favour of microgrids is the only sure way to return agency to slum dwellers.
Currently, there are many social theories but none which have been formally tested because, in macrosociology, replication under genuinely comparable conditions has not been possible. A research strategy based on computer simulations is...
moreCurrently, there are many social theories but none which have been formally tested because, in macrosociology, replication under genuinely comparable conditions has not been possible. A research strategy based on computer simulations is described that gives sociologists a practical quantitative technique for testing social theories and for comparing alternative hypotheses under identical research conditions. The strategy is demonstrated on a social theory of change in normative systems and illustrated with one of the empirical data sets that have been used to test the theory.
... Some displays need you to be directly in front of them: LEDs can be seen anywhere in an arc of 120 degrees. They can be manufactured 1. Shuji Nakamura, Stephen Pearton and GerhardFasol, The Blue Laser Diode: The Complete Story, New...
more... Some displays need you to be directly in front of them: LEDs can be seen anywhere in an arc of 120 degrees. They can be manufactured 1. Shuji Nakamura, Stephen Pearton and GerhardFasol, The Blue Laser Diode: The Complete Story, New York: Springer, 2000. ...
Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments...
moreEcocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endless opportunities for misunderstanding when we capture, store, and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concern the construction of a “we” that embraces the human and non- human victims of ecocide. The master’s tools might dismantle the master’s house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than- human social change?
The following short pictorial and textual contributions by Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt, John Goto, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Michael Najjar, Simone Osthoff, Nancy Roth, Bernd-Alexander Stiegler, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Siegfried Zielinski...
moreThe following short pictorial and textual contributions by Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt, John Goto, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Michael Najjar, Simone Osthoff, Nancy Roth, Bernd-Alexander Stiegler, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Siegfried Zielinski explore the practical and theoretical relevance and actuality of Vilém Flusser‘s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, first published as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie in 1983. It has been translated into more than 14 different languages.
Emily Candela, Sean Cubitt, Barnaby Dicker, Benedict Drew, and Esther Leslie, ‘Liquid Crystals: A Roundtable’, Journal of Visual Culture 17 (1) (April 2018), pp. 22–67 This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid...
moreEmily Candela, Sean Cubitt, Barnaby Dicker, Benedict Drew, and Esther Leslie, ‘Liquid Crystals: A Roundtable’, Journal of Visual Culture 17 (1) (April 2018), pp. 22–67 This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and refraction, is key to the advent of screen-based media (LCD TVs, computers and mobile devices) and thus how we perceive, image and imagine the world. As such, liquid crystals as a ‘phase of matter’ are epochal. But more than this because, while the emergence of such a brave new world is manifestly contemporary and their ‘discovery’ is comparatively recent (1888), the very fact of liquid crystals goes back at least 4.5 billion years: water, for instance, is crystalline and th...
This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. The development of large-scale screens in public places parallels the emergence of handheld screen...
moreThis article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. The development of large-scale screens in public places parallels the emergence of handheld screen devices (phones, tablets, MP3 players, games consoles), yet they seem to pull in opposite social directions: toward mass social participation and spectacle on one side, toward intimate, private experience and one-to-one communication on the other. Increasing commercialization of both types of screen, and the increasing technical standardization of screens in general, indicate a subordination of screen aesthetics to the extraction of wealth and to the extension of control. This essay analyzes the political economy of contemporary screens as ground for an aesthetic that, while praising innovation, sacrifices the virtuality of screen technology—its capacity to become other. Drawing on research into transnational public screen space, it concludes optim...
ABSTRACT Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue...
moreABSTRACT Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue that both the 'post-medium condition' mooted by Krauss and the 'Death of Cinema' theses of film scholars like Rodowick and Mulvey miss critical issues in these transitions and over-emphasize others. We make the case that there are more continuities than often recognized between analogue and digital; that transitional forms like video have not been analysed sufficiently; that software studies needs to be backed up with hardware studies; and that there is a new role for mediumspecific criticism. We argue that, in the current state of digital resources for production, distribution and display, each work needs to be analysed in its specificity, rather than ascribing universal qualities to imaginary abstractions such as 'digital media'.