Gábor Bódy 1946-1985. A Presentation of his Work (1987) [English/Hungarian]

Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.

This publication appeared on the occasion of the Gábor Bódy life-work exhibition organized in Budapest at the Ernst Museum, the Tinódi Cinema and the Palace of Exhibitions, January 19 – February 8, 1987.

Project and coordination: László Beke, Miklós Peternák
Publisher: Budapest: Mucsarnok, 1987

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Hollis Frampton: Circles of Confusion. Film/Photography/Video Texts 1968-1981 (1983)

Hollis Frampton is most well known as an independent filmmaker, but has been lecturing and writing about photography, film and video for a long time and in many places and publications. Circles of Confusion assembles eleven articles from exhibition catalogs and from October and Artforum. What Frampton does as a critic is much like what he does as a filmmaker, which is to strip the creative process down to its basic elements, then arrange and display the components..

Framptont’s role in this is critic-as-conjurer . He prestidigitates ideas and illusions from everywhere–history, psychology, philosophy, literature, even archaeology, whatever might apply. However much he may circle, though, he always comes back to basic ontological questions. What is photography? Film? Video? What are the properties that make them unique? What has film to do with narrative? Photography with space and time? Beyond a king these questions Frampton also conjectures about the possible ways of asking them and the likelihood of getting an answer. He also plays the role of critic-as-authoritative-voice, but by exposing the jagged mechanisms of thought makes the reader much more than a participant in the process than is usually the case.

Foreword by Annette Michelson
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983
ISBN 0898220203, 9780898220209
Length 200 pages, 32 pages of black and white

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Patricia Ticineto Clough: Autoaffection. Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000)

Explores the connection between new theories, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.

In this book, Patricia Ticineto Clough reenergizes critical theory by viewing poststructuralist thought through the lens of “teletechnology,” using television as a recurring case study to illuminate the changing relationships between subjectivity, technology, and mass media.

Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism—feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.

In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz-to name only a few-placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2000
ISBN 0816628890, 9780816628896
Length 213 pages

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Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990/1994)

In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.

Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Foreword by Walter Murch
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1994
ISBN 0231078986, 9780231078986
Length 239 pages

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David Joselit: Feedback: Television Against Democracy (2007)

American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.

The figures whose work Joselit examines—among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van Peebles—staged political interventions within the space of television. Joselit identifies three kinds of such image-events: feedback, which can be both disabling noise and rational response—as when Abbie Hoffman hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and even blocking systems—as in Nam June Paik’s synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function as a political actor—as in Melvin Van Peebles’s invention of Sweet Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and the Internet offer different opportunities for democratic participation.

In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media—including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art history has the capacity to become a political science.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0-262-10120-3, 978-0-262-10120-2
Length 210 pages

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Sean Cubitt: Videography. Video Media as Art and Culture (1993)

Videography is an attempt to discover the conditions under which it is possible to speak, write and teach about the electronic media. It provides a materialist account of video and computer media as they are practised and used today. A theoretical section tests the claims of various theses in art history, media and cultural theory to account for the variety of video practice in the contemporary scene. The remainder of the book is devoted to close analysis of work, from amateur video to computer graphics.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 1993
ISBN 0312102968, 9780312102968
Length 239 pages

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Kevin F. McCarthy, Elizabeth H. Ondaatje: From Celluloid to Cyberspace: The Media Arts and the Changing Arts World (2002)

The arts in America are entering a new era that will pose many challenges for the arts community. However, our current knowledge of the operation of the arts world and its underlying dynamics is limited. These limits are particularly pronounced with regard to the newest and most dynamic component of the arts world: the media arts. Defined as art that is produced using or combining film, video, and computers, the media arts encompass a diverse array of artistic work that includes narrative, documentary, and experimental films; videos and digital products; and installation art using media. This report examines the organizational features of the media arts, placing them in the context of the broader arts environment and identifying the major challenges they face. Rather than discussing aesthetics or individual artists or works, the authors take a structural point of view, discussing audiences, media artists as a group, arts organizations, and funding for the media arts. They conclude that the media arts need both greater public visibility and a clearer sense of their own identity. They should become more attuned and responsive to the policy context in which they operate and should address the lack of systematic, quantitative information about the field. Finally, the media arts need to become actively involved in building greater public involvement in their work.

Publisher Rand Corporation, 2002
ISBN 0833030760, 9780833030764
Length 79 pages

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Third Text. Special Issue: Media Arts: Practice, Institutions and Histories (2009)

Special issue of Third Text journal is an update on the development and current state of new media arts in some “under-represented” regions and contexts of the world, from New Zealand to India and from South Africa to the former East of Europe.

Guest Editors: Sean Cubitt, Jose-Carlos Mariategui and Gunalan Nadarajan.
Contributions by (among others) Nina Czegledy and Andrea Szekeres, Olga Goriunova, Pi Li, Marcus Neustetter and Ravi Sundaram.

Third Text Vol 23 Issue 3 2009
Publisher: Routledge
ISSN: 1475-5297 (electronic) 0952-8822 (paper)
Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year

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Laura U. Marks: Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002)

In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years-sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.

From this emerges a materialist theory-an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks’s approach leads to an appreciation of the works’ mortal bodies: film’s volatile emulsion, video’s fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as “virtual” and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 0816638896, 9780816638895
Length 259 pages

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A. L. Rees: A History of Experimental Film and Video: From Canonical Avant-garde to Contemporary British Practice (1999)

Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In this book A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between, on the one hand, the cinema, and, on the other hand, modern art (with its post-modern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse.

This is the first major history of avant-garde film and video to be published in more than twenty years. Ranging from Cezanne and dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British video artists in the 90s, this remarkable study will introduce a generation of new readers to avant-garde film as well as provoking students and specialists to further reflection and debate.

Publisher BFI Publishing, 1999
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0851706843, 9780851706849

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Deirdre Boyle: Subject to Change. Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997)

In Subject to Change, Deirdre Boyle interweaves the narratives of three very different video collectives from the 1970s – TVTV, Broadside TV, and University Community Video – to tell a fascinating story of video “guerrillas” and their efforts to remake television to include voices and visions absent from the broadcast media mix.

Keywords and phrases
Michael Shamberg, Megan Williams, guerrilla television, Freex, Paul Goldsmith, portapak, WNET, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Rucker, KTCA, TVTV Show, Greg Pratt, TVTV’s, Ira Schneider, Cajun, David Loxton, cable television, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Appalachia

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1997
ISBN 0195110544, 9780195110548
Length 286 pages

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Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska and Piotr Krajewski (eds.): From Absolute Cinema to Future Film. Materials from the history of experiment in the moving picture art (2009)

WIDOK is a new cycle of multimedia publications by WRO Art Center, a reader of textual and audiovisual materials on theory, esthetics and history of new media art.

This book, From Absolute Cinema to Future Film. Materials from the history of experiment in the moving picture art, initiates a new series of publications entitled Widok. WRO Media Art Reader. Its subsequent topical issues will be devoted to the presentation of materials about theory, esthetics and history of new media art.

Widok (Polish for “the view”) means a particular perspective, but it is also the name of the street in Wrocław where WRO Art Center has opened in 2008. In accordance with its name, the series presents an insight into cultural and artistic phenomena from the realm of new media, as seen through the collection and archives of the International Media Art Biennale WRO. It is thus a view shaped by the works, topics and personalities throughout 20 years of WRO activities, presenting the nexus of art, technology and social phenomena emerging from the shifting domains of artistic creation and media.

Book (Polish) + DVD (Polish/English [subtitled])

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Radical Software magazine (1970-1974)

The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. Though scholarly works on video art history often refer to Radical Software, there are few places where scholars can review its contents. Individual copies are rare, and few complete collections exist.

Radical Software was an important voice of the American video community in the early 70s; the only periodical devoted exclusively to independent video and video art at the time when those subjects were still being invented. Issues included contributions by Nam June Paik, Douglas Davis, Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Beryl Korot, Charles Bensinger, Ira Schneider, Ann Tyng, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Gene Youngblood, Parry Teasdale, Ant Farm, and many others.

Eleven issues of Radical Software were published from 1970 to 1974, first by the Raindance Corporation and then by the Raindance Foundation with Gordon and Breach Publishers.

Radical Software, Volume I, Number 1
The Alternate Television Movement,
Spring 1970
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Radical Software, Volume I, Number 2
The Electromagnetic Spectrum,
Autumn 1970
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Radical Software, Volume I, Number 3
Untitled, Spring 1971
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Radical Software, Volume I, Number 4
Untitled, Summer 1971
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Radical Software, Volume I, Number 5
Realistic Hope Foundation,
Spring 1972
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 1
Changing Channels, Winter 1972
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 2
The TV Environment, Spring 1973
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 3
Videocity, Summer 1973
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 4
Solid State, Autumn 1973
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 5
Video and Environment, Winter 1973
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Radical Software, Volume II, Number 6
Video and Kids, Summer 1974
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Timothy Murray: Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008)

In this intellectually groundbreaking work, Timothy Murray investigates a paradox embodied in the book’s title: What is the relationship between digital, in the form of new media art, and baroque, a highly developed early modern philosophy of art? Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts.

Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts’ dialogue with early modern concepts. Among the works discussed are digitally oriented films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker; video installations by Thierry Kuntzel, Keith Piper, and Renate Ferro; and interactive media works by Toni Dove, David Rokeby, and Jill Scott. Sophisticated readings reveal the electronic psychosocial webs and digital representations that link text, film, and computer.

Murray puts forth an innovative Deleuzian psychophilosophical approach—one that argues that understanding new media art requires a fundamental conceptual shift from linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816634017, 9780816634019
320 pages

Key terms:
Prospero’s Books, Bill Viola, King Lear, Gilles Deleuze, CD-ROM, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Laplanche, Louis Marin, Peter Greenaway, Leibniz, Keith Piper, Miroslaw Rogala, Psychoanalysis, Mary Ann Doane, Mona Hatoum, Kuntzel’s, electronic arts, Okinawa, scansion

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Blake Stimson, Gregory Sholette (eds): Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (2007)

“Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls

“Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of collaboration is back on the agenda. Collectivism after Modernism convincingly proves that art collectives did not stop after the proclaimed death of the historical avant-gardes. Like never before technology reinvents the social and artists claim the steering wheel!” —Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam

“This examination of the succession of post-war avant-gardes and collectives is new, important, and engaged.” — Stephen F. Eisenman, author of The Abu Ghraib Effect

“Collectivism after Modernism crucially helps us understand what artists and others can do in mushy, stinky times like ours. What can the seemingly powerless do in the face of mighty forces that seem to have their act really together? Here, Stimson and Sholette put forth many good answers.” —Yes Men

Spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism explores the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future.

Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Jesse Drew, Okwui Enwezor, Rubén Gallo, Chris Gilbert, Brian Holmes, Alan Moore, Jelena Stojanovi´c, Reiko Tomii, Rachel Weiss.

Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life.

“To understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production is the aim of Collectivism after Modernism. The essays assembled in this anthology argue that to make truly collective art means to reconsider the relation between art and public; examples from the Situationist International and Group Material to Paper Tiger Television and the Congolese collective Le Groupe Amos make the point. To construct an art of shared experience means to go beyond projecting what Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette call the “imagined community”: a collective has to be more than an ideal, and more than communal craft; it has to be a truly social enterprise. Not only does it use unconventional forms and media to communicate the issues and experiences usually excluded from artistic representation, but it gives voice to a multiplicity of perspectives. At its best it relies on the participation of the audience to actively contribute to the work, carrying forth the dialogue it inspires.” —BOMB

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816644624, 9780816644629
312 pages

Key terms: Art & Language, collectivism, unitary urbanism, Akasegawa Genpei, video art, detournement, conceptual art, Asger Jorn, Fluxus, ABTV, Ernesto Leal, Situationist International, Guy Debord, Havana, Glexis Novoa, cold war, Art Workers Coalition, avant-garde, Cuba, Gutai

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