In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make a case for a
significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue that we should
move beyond our fascination with objects--computers, smart phones, iPods,
Kindles--to an examination of the interlocking technical, social, and
biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they say, reveals that life itself
can be understood as mediated--subject to the same processes of reproduction,
transformation, flattening, and patenting undergone by other media forms. By
Kember and Zylinska's account, the dispersal of media and technology into our
biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman
entities. Mediation--all-encompassing and indivisible--becomes for them a key
trope for understanding our being in the technological world. Drawing on the
work of Bergson and Derrida while displaying a rigorous playfulness toward
philosophy, Kember and Zylinska examine the multiple flows of mediation.
Importantly, they also consider the ethical necessity of making a
"cut" to any media processes in order to contain them. Considering
topics that range from media-enacted cosmic events to the intelligent home,
they propose a new way of "doing" media studies that is simultaneously
critical and creative, and that performs an encounter between theory and
practice.
The Studio is one of a
series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art. With the
emergence of conceptual art in the mid-1960s, the traditional notion of the
studio became at least partly obsolete. Other sites emerged for the generation
of art, leading to the idea of "post-studio practice." But the studio
never went away; it was continually reinvented in response to new realities.
This collection, expanding on current critical interest in issues of production
and situation, looks at the evolution of studio - and 'post-studio' - practice
over the last half century. In recent decades many artists have turned their
studios into offices from which they organize a multiplicity of operations and
interactions. Others use the studio as a quasi-exhibition space, or work on a
laptop computer - mobile, flexible, and ready to follow the next commission. Among
the topics surveyed here are the changing portrayal and experience of the
artist's role since 1960; the diversity of current studio and post-studio
practice; the critical strategies of artists who have used the studio situation
as the subject or point of origin for their work; the insights to be gained
from archival studio projects; and the expanded field of production that arises
from responding to new conditions in the world outside the studio. The essays
and artists' statements in this volume explore these questions with a focus on
examining the studio's transition from a workshop for physical production to a
space with potential for multiple forms of creation and participation.
This is a superb
collection of interviews with some of the most significant and influential
names in art, architecture, film, music, history, literature and philosophy
from the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 1993, renowned curator, writer,
cultural instigator, professional conversationalist - and currently Co-director
of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the
Serpentine Gallery in London - Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting
interviews with some of the most significant architects, artists, filmmakers,
historians, musicians, philosophers, and writers of the 20th and 21st
centuries. "Interviews Volume 2" brings together 70 interviews, taken
from an archive of nearly 2,000 hours of recordings that reveal an intellectual
geology of the last 100 years. Encyclopaedic in scope and intimate in tone,
these exchanges produce an array of biographical trajectories, cultural
experiments, theoretical adventures, unrealized projects, and unknown
epiphanies.
This book takes a fresh
"how to" approach to Practice as Research. At the "performance
turn" it argues that old prejudices should be abandoned and that a PaR
methodology and its modes of "doing-knowing" should be fully accepted
in the academy. It refines Robin Nelson's earlier models for PaR but sustains
the dynamic and dialogic interplay between different modes of
knowledge-production in a multi-mode research inquiry. It advances strategies
for articulating and evidencing the research inquiry and offers practical
guidance to practitioner-researchers on how to conduct a PaR inquiry. With
reference to examples drawn from a decade of supervisory, examining and audit
experience, Nelson addresses - and offers answers to - the many questions
students, professional practitioner-researchers, regulators and examiners have
posed in this domain. To broaden the perspective and take account of differing
levels of acceptance and development of programmes in PaR around the word, in
Part II of the book six international contributors respond to Part I and afford
cross-sights from the standpoint of their territory.
In Techniques of the
Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual
culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual
modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary
considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images,
but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that
the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and
examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new
discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a
physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics,
Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were
developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while
simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.
Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical
sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses
at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and
of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new
physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually
labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of
vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and
representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth
century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before
the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.
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