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Media soundscapes: listening to installation and performance Media scholars have pointed out the recent ubiquity of moving image media in the historically ‘visual’ art spaces of museums and art galleries.1 Indeed, I cannot recall a recent visit to an art gallery, museum, or alternative art space where I did not encounter works that feature or incorporate video, film, animation, or other forms of media. As a result, there is much to listen to in these ‘noisy’ spaces. Caleb Kelly provides a description: ‘Upon entering almost any contemporary gallery space, we hear
thresholds. This is because, according to Flusser, thought follows formally the conditions of its technical possibilities of expression. Despite the fact that it invents its own symbolic and technical media, thought adapts itself ever more perfectly to them in a virtual process of self-reproduction. While writing expresses the world through signs in a linear fashion, the technical image
2 The Zapatistas and the media spectacle A l m o s t from the beginning of the struggle and, more particularly, when they decided on a ceasefire in 1995, the Zapatistas’ emphasis shifted from the use of arms to the use of words.1 Through declarations, reports, letters and communiqués, they sent out their message to national and international media and thus to the world. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, one of the spokespersons of the movement, with his captivating communiqués, combining stories, poetry, philosophy, satire, romanticism and political analysis
Mao, militancy and media: Daniel Dezeuze and China from scroll to (TV) screen Sarah Wilson Experimental practice Linguistics, semiotics Chinese thought and writing With Marxism-Leninism Psychoanalysis The thought of Mao Zedong Peinture: Cahiers Théoriques, editorial, May 19711 In 2015 I proposed the French artist Daniel Dezeuze for the first Asian Biennale/fifth Guangzhou Triennale at the Guangdong Museum of Art. ‘Asia Time’, had prevailed over ‘Search: Asia’ as the exhibition concept, inspired by my fellow curator Zhang Qing’s readings around the clash of
In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury items signalling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons – to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customized in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value.
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
A battle of images is above all a psychological struggle. Unintended consequences are the rule rather than the exception. The book examines the role of images in media reports on terror from the nineteenth century to the present day. Looking at concrete case studies, Charlotte Klonk analyses image strategies and their patterns, traces their historical development and addresses the dilemma of effective counter strikes. She shows that the propaganda videos from the IS are nothing new. On the contrary, perpetrators of terror acts have always made use of images to spread their cause through the media – as did their enemy, the state. In the final chapter, Klonk turns to questions of ethics and considers the grounds for a responsible use of images. This is an indispensable book for understanding the background and dynamic of terror today.
This unique anthology presents thirty-two texts on contemporary prints and printmaking written from the mid-1980s to the present. The essays range from academic art history to popular art criticism and creative writing; taken together, they form a critical topography of printmaking today.
The book’s four sections provide: A genealogy of printmaking and print culture; A sample of debates on contemporary printmaking, beginning with Ruth Weisberg’s influential ‘The syntax of print’ (1986); A range of critical terms and themes; Examples of some of the major spheres of print activity, such as production, collecting, dissemination, education and research
Drawing on a cast of distinguished scholars, artists and curators, the book makes available a selection of widely dispersed and difficult-to-find texts. This includes extracts from works not yet available in English, such as Die Welt als T-Shirt (1997) by Beat Wyss and La Ressemblance par contact (2008) by Georges Didi-Huberman. There are also contributions from scholar and book artist Johanna Drucker, mathematician and computer artist Frieder Nake, curators Daniel F. Herrmann, Gill Saunders and Mari Carmen Ramírez, and the editors of the award-winning website Printeresting.
Featuring an overall introduction by the editor, as well as introductions to each of the sections, the anthology is aimed at an audience of international stakeholders in the field of contemporary prints, printmaking and print media, ranging from art students and practising artists to museum curators, critics, educationalists and scholars. It provides the basis for an expansion of the debate in the field and a starting point for further research.
Travelling images critically examines the migrations and transformations of images as they travel between different image communities. It consists of four case studies covering the period 1870–2010 and includes photocollages, window displays, fashion imagery and contemporary art projects. Through these four close-ups it seeks to reveal the mechanisms, nature and character of these migration processes, and the agents behind them, as well as the sites where they have taken place. The overall aim of this book is thus to understand the mechanisms of interfacing events in the borderlands of the art world. Two key arguments are developed in the book, reflected by its title Travelling images. First, the notion of travel and focus on movements and transformations signal an emphasis on the similarities between cultural artefacts and living beings. The book considers ‘the social biography’ and ‘ecology’ of images, but also, on a more profound level, the biography and ecology of the notion of art. In doing so, it merges perspectives from art history and image studies with media studies. Consequently, it combines a focus on the individual case, typical for art history and material culture studies with a focus on processes and systems, on continuities and ruptures, and alternate histories inspired by media archaeology and cultural historical media studies. Second, the central concept of image is in this book used to designate both visual conventions, patterns or contents and tangible visual images. Thus it simultaneously consider of content and materiality.