Technology and Desire

Description

The spectral realm at the boundaries of images incessantly reveals a desire to see beyond the visible and its medium: screens, frames, public displays and projection sites in an art context. The impact of new media on art and film has influenced the material histories and performances (be they in theory or practice) of images across the disciplines. Digital technologies have not only shaped post-cinematic media cultures and visual epistemologies, but they are behind a growing shift towards a new realism in theory, art, film and in the art of the moving image in particular. Technology and Desire examines the performative ontologies of moving images across the genealogies of media and their aesthetic agency in contemporary media and video art, CGI, painting, video games and installations. Drawing on cultural studies, media and film theory as well as art history to provide exemplary evidence of this shift, this book has as its central theme the question of whether images are predicated upon transgressing the boundaries of their framing – and whether in the course of their existence they develop a life of their own.

Introduction 

Post-medial Technologies of Desire: Performances of Images – Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz

Prelude 

Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or the Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries – Anselm Franke

PART I: Post-Medial Image Cultures and New Media Philosophies 75

Chapter 1: Technical Repetition and Digital Art, or Why the ‘Digital’ in Digital Cinema is not the ‘Digital’ in Digital Technics – Mark B. N. Hansen

Chapter 2: Arrest and Movement – Timothy Druckrey

Chapter 3: The Aesthetics of Flow and the Aesthetics of Catharsis – Jay David Bolter

Chapter 4: Digital Images and Computer Simulations – Barbara Flueckiger

Chapter 5: Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, or the Unthought at the Heart of Wood – Laura U. Marks

PART II: Fugitive Images and Transmediality

Chapter 6: Animated and Animating Landscapes: Space Voyages and Time Travel in the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Martin Schulz

Chapter 7: Copernicus and I: Revolutions in Perception and The Powers of Ten – Janet Harbord

Chapter 8: Cinema Mise en abyme: Contingencies of the Moving Image – Ursula Frohne

Chapter 9: Still Life in the Crosshairs, or For an Iconic Turn in Game Studies – Thomas Hensel

Chapter 10: Out of Image – Yvonne Spielmann

PART III: Post-Cinematic Desires: Genealogies of Anthropomorphic Transgressions 

Chapter 11: Choreographing the Moving Image: Post-Cinematic Desire and the Politics of Aesthetics – Isaac Julien

Chapter 12: Desire, Time and Transition in Anthropological Film-making – Ute Holl

Chapter 13: Longing in Film: Emotions in Images – Hinderk M. Emrich

Chapter 14: The Fever Curve of the Gaze and the Body as (Image) Medium: Jacques Lacan’s Media Theory of Unconscious Desire – Annette Bitsch

PART IV: Material Specters and the Lives of Images

Chapter 15: The Sequence Image Between Motion and Stillness – Jens Schröter

Chapter 16: Gaze and Withdrawal: On the ‘Logic’ of Iconic Structures – Dieter Mersch

Chapter 17: The Magical Image in Georges Méliès’s Cinema – Lorenz Engell

Chapter 18: Liminal Spaces: Notes by Film-maker and Artist Malcolm Le Grice – Malcolm LeGrice

Chapter 19: Transgression: The Ethical Turn and the New Politics – Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the Multicultural Dilemma – Thomas Elsaesser

Chapter 20: Radicant Spaces of Enunciation: Visual Art, ‘Phenomenotechnique’, and ‘Criticality’ – Towards a Postcolonial Media(l) Theory – Rania Gaafar

Biographies of Authors

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Gaming
• Cultural studies
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201662
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Sahar Aharoni
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik and Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-461-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-167-9
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-166-2
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction Post-medial Technologies of Desire: Performances of Images
Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz
Prelude Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or the Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries
Anselm Franke
PART I: Post-Medial Image Cultures and New Media Philosophies
Chapter 1: Technical Repetition and Digital Art, or Why the ‘Digital’ in Digital Cinema is not the ‘Digital’ in Digital Technics
Mark B. N. Hansen
Chapter 2: Arrest and Movement
Timothy Druckrey
Chapter 3: The Aesthetics of Flow and the Aesthetics of Catharsis
Jay David Bolter
Chapter 4: Digital Images and Computer Simulations
Barbara Flueckiger
Chapter 5: Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, or the Unthought at the Heart of Wood
Laura U. Marks
PART II: Fugitive Images and Transmediality
Chapter 6: Animated and Animating Landscapes: Space Voyages and Time Travel in the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Martin Schulz
Chapter 7: Copernicus and I: Revolutions in Perception and The Powers of Ten
Janet Harbord
Chapter 8: Cinema Mise en abyme: Contingencies of the Moving Image
Ursula Frohne
Chapter 9: Still Life in the Crosshairs, or For an Iconic Turn in Game Studies
Thomas Hensel
Chapter 10: Out of Image
Yvonne Spielmann
PART III: Post-Cinematic Desires: Genealogies of Anthropomorphic Transgressions
Chapter 11: Choreographing the Moving Image: Post-Cinematic Desire and the Politics of Aesthetics
Isaac Julien
Chapter 12: Desire, Time and Transition in Anthropological Film-making
Ute Holl
Chapter 13: Longing in Film: Emotions in Images
Hinderk M. Emrich
Chapter 14: The Fever Curve of the Gaze and the Body as (Image) Medium: Jacques Lacan’s Media Theory of Unconscious Desire
Annette Bitsch
PART IV: Material Specters and the Lives of Images
Chapter 15: The Sequence Image Between Motion and Stillness
Jens Schröter
Chapter 16: Gaze and Withdrawal: On the ‘Logic’ of Iconic Structures
Dieter Mersch
Chapter 17: The Magical Image in Georges Méliès’s Cinema
Lorenz Engell
Chapter 18: Liminal Spaces: Notes by Film-maker and Artist Malcolm Le Grice
Malcolm LeGrice
Chapter 19: Transgression: The Ethical Turn and the New Politics – Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the Multicultural Dilemma
Thomas Elsaesser
Chapter 20: Radicant Spaces of Enunciation: Visual Art, ‘Phenomenotechnique’, and ‘Criticality’ – Towards a Postcolonial Media(l) Theory
Rania Gaafar
Biographies of Authors
Acknowledgements
The idea of organizing an international conference on the transgressive art of moving images against the background of the ever-growing body of research in visual studies, the role of imaging technologies and the impact of the digital advent in art history, media, film, and cultural studies came to us amidst our involvement in the doctoral school Image, Body, Medium – Towards an Anthropological Perspective that was based at Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design). At the time, we discussed the objective to conceptually and methodologically extend the very notion of the ‘life of images’ (W. J. T. Mitchell) to that of reflections on the (new) technologies of images’ production and their very aesthetics, as well as the sublime desire of images in motion that we felt were perpetually transgressing their very frames in the contemporary (post-)medial contexts of our time. In reference to these visually conceptual correlations, we invited a number of scholars to contribute and participate in a major international conference entitled Technology and Desire – The Transgressive Art of Moving Images that was held at the Zentrum für Kunst – und Medientechnologie, ZKM (Centre for Art and Media), in Karlsruhe, in close cooperation with the Art Theory and Media Philosophy department of the University of Arts and Design . Most of the papers in this volume were presented at this conference. The ZKM as an internationally renowned cutting-edge art and media research institution provided the conference’s venue. This conference and publication would have not been possible without the generous financial funding of the DFG (the German Research Funding Organization) doctoral school Image, Body, Medium – Towards an Anthropological Perspective, to which we, in retrospect, express our sincere thanks. We owe our deep gratitude to Samantha King from Intellect Books who has acknowledged the idea and the potential of this book in the beginning. We especially thank Jelena Stanovnik, our committed editor at Intellect, who has produced and supported this project during all its different stages and navigated it to the end with Intellect’s editorial team. We would like to thank Sahar Aharoni, who photographed and designed the conference’s logo and poster of an abstract camera’s lens and turned it into a vision of plasticity, which also serves as the cover of this volume. Our gratitude goes to Jochen Mevius, who has translated a number of chapters from German to English as indicated in this volume. Adel Iskandar has given us helpful advice in reviewing parts of the manuscript. We should particularly like to thank the staff at ZKM’s library, whose help has been indispensable for the research on this collection. Elke Reinhuber and Sebastian Pelz have kindly supported the final stages of production. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer whose precise comments have helped to amend the manuscript. Finally, our cordial thanks go to all contributors of this volume, their challenging and rigorous talks and texts, as well as their patience during the time of the preparation of this volume. Last, but never least, we sincerely thank all the artists in this collection, who have provided installation shots and images of their art works, especially Isaac Julien, Malcolm LeGrice, Rohini Devasher, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Youki Hirakawa, and Jim Campbell. Very warm thanks go to Isaac Julien for stimulating conversations, his kind support during the production of this volume and beyond, as well as the inspirational and intellectual insight into his own artistic practice that he generously shared with us in long interviews and meetings in London and Germany.
Introduction
Post-medial Technologies of Desire: Performances of Images
Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz
In James Williamson’s pioneering short film The Big Swallow (1901), the spectator paradigmatically encounters the physical human resistance to the capturing and signifying camera – and, by extension, to the operator’s attempt to display an image of the subject in front of the camera lens. The form-and-shape-giving machinery of his very image on the screen is literally swallowed up by the actor on-screen, who is in front of the camera. The critical irony of this shot and further reflection of it will probably become more obvious today, more than a hundred years after the production of Williamson’s film, and with the advent of the digital, the post-humanist and techno-scientific yet affect-induced material turn in cultural and media theory. In the very seconds following this ‘big swallow’ and the extreme close-up of the mouth with its almost infinitely dark antrum, what we see is basically the reappearance of the image, the continuing existence and animation of the moving image, of the film itself, despite and after the supposed disappearance of the recording camera within the moving image’s hors cadre – and inside the subject’s body. The image resists its allegedly human-operated animation and origination, as well as its time, its technologically-controlled actuality and visibility on the screen. It references an ‘outside’ of images in critical thought as well as in the spheres of the virtual that lie beyond the semiotic layers of signs and the external control and operation of humans. It rather transforms them to conditions of new assemblages by referencing forms of embodiment through the image’s transmissive constituents and techniques. This transformational process and its embedded outcome (i.e. the continuous and uninterrupted film we see despite the killing of the camera) within the image implies to a certain extent an ‘intra-action’ of phenomena that performatively ‘enact boundaries’ 1 and seek a ‘new form of realism’ 2 that challenges the boundaries between subjects and objects and accomplishes matter and its vital conditions through discourse (be it cultural, technological, science-oriented or media specific).
Despite the human killing of its mechanical generator – the camera – we might reflect this very short paradigmatic and intra-relational example as a literal embodiment of the camera by the image, and hence the technological means of vision as a defiant form of agency; or we might scrutinize this so-called ‘after-image’ – enacted in filmic time and its duration, whilst referencing an extra-machinic movement in the plane of an ongoing transformation on the screen – as one of the many ways towards the contingent history of the virtual life of images, for it discloses that ambivalent cycle of fear and desire as part of the image’s transgression