Rainey, Poggi, Wittman (eds.): Futurism: An Anthology (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, art history, avantgarde, futurism, history of music, literature, music
In 1909, F.T. Marinetti published his incendiary Futurist Manifesto, proclaiming, “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!!” and “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” Intent on delivering Italy from “its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians,” the Futurists imagined that art, architecture, literature, and music would function like a machine, transforming the world rather than merely reflecting it. But within a decade, Futurism’s utopian ambitions were being wedded to Fascist politics, an alliance that would tragically mar its reputation in the century to follow.
Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Futurism, this is the most complete anthology of Futurist manifestos, poems, plays, and images ever to bepublished in English, spanning from 1909 to 1944. Now, amidst another era of unprecedented technological change and cultural crisis, is a pivotal moment to reevaluate Futurism and its haunting legacy for Western civilization.
Editors Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman
Publisher Yale University Press, 2009
Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity
ISBN 0300088752, 9780300088755
Length 604 pages
Michael North: Camera Works. Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avantgarde, cinema, film, history of cinema, history of photography, literature, modernity, photography
“Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored.
Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the avant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work , through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920’s.
Subseguent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls “spectroscopic gayety,” the enjoyable diorientation of the senses by machine perception, turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway. Together, these chapters offer a new and substantially different account of the relationship between modern American literature and the mediatized society of the early twentieth century.
With a comprehensive introduction and detailed particular readings, Camera Works substantiates a new understanding of the formal and historical bases of modernism. It argues that when modern literature and art respond to modernity, on a formal level, they are responding to the intervention of technology in the transmission of meaning, an intervention that unsettles all the terms in the essential relationship of human consciousness to the world of phenomena.
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2005
Oxford scholarship online
ISBN 0195173562, 9780195173567
Length 255 pages
William Uricchio (ed.): We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · balkans, europe, european union, film, identity, imagined community, literature, mass media, photography, public broadcasting, television
This volume explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault-lines and fissures of the ever-shifting collectivities that constitute Europe. At the centre of this dynamic are human beings, who, as makers and users of media, negotiate identities, affiliations and meanings.
The collection explores how ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations and languages overlap one another, interact within individuals and define communities. Whether triggered by individual desires or shared fantasies, these dynamic collectivities make use of media in very different ways. Addressing topics such as films and television programmes, the Euro, photographs, postcards or public monuments, contributors reflect on this notion of ‘new collectivities’, not in an individualistic sense or collectively as nations but as multiple and shifting identities. With this as a starting point, the volume interrogates the processes that create and shape identity and characterize Europe as it physically expands and administratively consolidates. Essays explore media texts as sites of dreams and longed for identities, and articulate the fears and tensions surrounding the uses of transnational media, whether for purposes of cultural homogenization or isolation.
Drawing on novels, films and the press, the volume demonstrates the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform and give shape to the present. We Europeans? Media, Representation, Identities addresses a scholarly readership with an interest in textual analysis and policy issues regarding media, identity and the many vantage points of Europe.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2009
Volume 6 of Changing media–changing Europe series
ISBN 1841502073, 9781841502076
Length 224 pages
Kloaka 1-2 (2010) [Slovak]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · art, literature, theory
Magazín experimentálnej a nekonvenčnej tvorby.
Editors: Michal Rehúš, Jakub Repický
Published by Literis, April 2010
Volume I
ISSN 1338-158X
Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · literature, mass media, media studies, philosophy, photography, recording, sociology, technology, teletechnologies, television
In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?
As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.
In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.
Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes
Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages
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Comment (0)Len Lye: Figures of Motion. Selected Writings (1984)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art history, film, literature, sculpture
Editors Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks
Publisher Auckland University Press, 1984
ISBN 0196479967, 9780196479965
Length 152 pages
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Comment (0)Mark Wollaeger: Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, literature, media ecology, modernism, narrative, propaganda, theatre, united kingdom, war
Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today’s highly propagandized world.
Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2008
ISBN 0691138451, 9780691138459
Length 335 pages
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · electronic literature, hypertext, literature, storage, textuality, writing
In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson’s electronic poem “Agrippa.”
Drawing on newly available archival resources for these works, Kirschenbaum uses a hex editor and disk image of Mystery House to conduct a “forensic walkthrough” to explore critical reading strategies linked to technical praxis; examines the multiple versions and revisions of Afternoon in order to address the diachronic dimension of electronic textuality; and documents the volatile publication and transmission history of “Agrippa” as an illustration of the social aspect of transmission and preservation.
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262113112, 9780262113113
Length 296 pages
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Comment (0)Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · computer games, fiction, hypertext, immersion, installation art, interactivity, literature, narrative, phenomenology, postmodern, reading, textuality, virtual reality
Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.
Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
Length 399 pages
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Jill Walker: Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World (2003)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · fiction, gaming, hypertext, interactivity, literature
“This thesis is about works in which the user is a character in the fictional world, and it is about the kind of interaction that such works allow. In this introduction I will explain my research goals and introduce the theme of control, which is important in the thesis. I’ll also describe the genres I’m looking at, define some basic terms and present a summary of what each chapter deals with.”
Dr. art. thesis
Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, 2003
Length 191 pages
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Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · ficion, hypertext, literature, reading, screen, technology, text, theory
“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
Length 368 pages
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Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, epistemology, impressionism, literary criticism, literature, mimesis, photography, poetry
Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.
Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
Length 209 pages
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N. Katherine Hayles: Writing Machines (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · electronic literature, literary theory, literature, narrative, theory
Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.
Weaving together Kaye’s pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott’s groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips’s artist’s book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.
Publisher MIT Press, 2002
ISBN 0262582155, 9780262582155
Length 144 pages
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Zuzana Husárová: Písanie v interaktívnych médiách. Digitálna fikcia (2009) [Slovak]
Filed under thesis | Tags: · digital fiction, hypertext, interactive media, interactivity, intermedia, literary science, literature, media theory
Predmetom dizertačnej práce je predstavenie a kontextualizácia možností písania v interaktívnych médiách a skúmanie literárneho umenia interaktívnych médií v anglofónnom priestore. Pre dnešnú tvorbu umeleckých diel v interaktívnych médiách je príznačný intermediálny charakter; autori pre predstavenie fiktívneho sveta často prepájajú text, obraz a zvuk do výpovedného celku. Cieľom práce je vyjadriť sa jednak k otázkam, ktoré síce nie sú nové, avšak digitálny formát a priestor internetu im umožnili nadobudnúť nové rozmery a aj k otázkam pre výskum digitálnej fikcie špecifickým. Výskum sa zameriava na digitálnu fikciu – v počítačovom programe napísané digitálne dielo, v ktorom autor ponúka svet fikcie. V práci sú predstavené viaceré aspekty digitálnej fikcie, ktorých kombinácia je indikátorom jej charakteristického postavenia v rámci ostatného digitálneho umenia – fragmentárnosť rozprávania, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamika, intermedialita a princípy hry a hravosti. Fenoménmi súčasnosti, ktoré pôsobia aj na tvorbu skúmaných diel a ich čitateľskú popularitu sú estetická atraktivita, ktorú v tomto kontexte prináša predovšetkým využitie diverzity medialít a pokus o vyvolanie čo najintenzívnejšieho zážitku v čo najkratšom čase. Práca pozostáva okrem úvodu, záveru a interlúdia (venovanému kategórii materiality digitálnej fikcie) zo štyroch kľúčových kapitol. V týchto kapitolách sú vedecké prístupy k skúmanej problematike písania v interaktívnych médiách následne využité pri analýze-interpretácii konkrétnych digitálnych fikcií.
Kľúčové slová : digitálna fikcia, interaktívne médiá, fragmentárnosť, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamickosť, intermedialita, hra, literárna veda, teória nových médií, teória digitálnej fikcie, hypertext, kybertext, materialita, metamedialita
Dizertačná práca
Ústav svetovej literatúry Slovenskej akadémie vied v Bratislave
Školiteľ: Mgr. Bogumiła Suwara, PhD.
Bratislava: ÚSvL SAV, 2009
Dizajn: Pavlinka Morháčová
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Writing in the interactive media. Digital fiction
The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play. The current phenomena that influence also the creation of the analysed art pieces and their popularity among readers are the aesthetic attraction, in this context brought mainly by the use of media diversity, and the effort to evoke the most intensive experience in the shortest time span. The thesis consists apart from the introduction, conclusion and interludium (dealing with the materiality of digital fiction) of four chapters. The scientific approaches to the problematics of writing in the interactive media are in the second parts of these chapters used in the process of analysis-interpretation of particular digital fiction pieces.
Key words : digital fiction, interactive media, fragmentarity, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality, play, game, literary science, new media theory, digital fiction theory, hypertext, cybertext, materiality, metamediality
Comment (0)Garin Dowd: Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of philosophy, literature, philosophy
“Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari” is an innovative approach to the relationship of the work of Samuel Beckett to philosophy. The study seeks to combine intertextual analysis and a ’schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to explore a ‘becoming-philosophy’ of Beckett’s literary writing. The author focuses on zones of encounter and confrontation – spaces and times of ‘becoming’ – between Beckett, selected philosophers and Deleuze and Guattari. In the retrospective glance occasioned by that part of Deleuze and Guattari’s complex legacy which embraces their interest in the author, Beckett’s writing in particular effectuates a threshold hesitation which can be seen directly to impact on their approach to the history of philosophy and on their contribution to its ‘molecularization’ in the name of experimentation. “Abstract Machines,” with its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s work, will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical echoes so evident in his writing. The extent of its recourse to philosophers aside from Deleuze and Guattari, including, notably, Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates concerning the relationship of literature to philosophy, both within Beckett studies and beyond.
Publisher Rodopi, 2007
ISBN 904202206X, 9789042022065
Length 319 pages
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