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.
Table of Contents
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
1 Technical Repetition and Digital Art, or Why the ‘Digital’ in Digital Cinema is not the ‘Digital’ in Digital Technics
Mark B. N. Hansen
2 Arrest and Movement
Timothy Druckrey
3 The Aesthetics of Flow and the Aesthetics of Catharsis
Jay David Bolter
4 Digital Images and Computer Simulations
Barbara Flueckiger
5 Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, or the Unthought at the Heart of Wood
Laura U. Marks
Part II: Fugitive Images and Transmediality
6 Animated and Animating Landscapes: Space Voyages and Time Travel in the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Martin Schulz
7 Copernicus and I: Revolutions in Perception and The Powers of Ten
Janet Harbord
8 Cinema Mise en abyme: Contingencies of the Moving Image
Ursula Frohne
9 Still Life in the Crosshairs, or For an Iconic Turn in Game Studies
Thomas Hensel
10 Out of Image
Yvonne Spielmann
Part III: Post-Cinematic Desires: Geneaologies of Anthropomorphic Transgressions
11 Choreographing the Moving Image: Post-Cinematic Desire and the Politics of Aesthetics
Isaac Julien
12 Desire, Time and Transition in Anthropological Film-making
Ute Holl
13 Longing in Film: Emotions in Images
Hinderk M. Emrich
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
15 The Sequence Image between Motion and Stillness
Jens Schröter
16 Gaze and Withdrawal: On the ‘Logic’ of Iconic Structures
Dieter Mersch
17 The Magical Image in Georges Méliès’s Cinema
Lorenz Engell
18 Liminal Spaces: Notes by Film-maker and Artist Malcolm Le Grice
Malcolm LeGrice
19 Transgression: The Ethical Turn and the New Politics – Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the Multicultural Dilemma
Thomas Elsaesser
20 Radicant Spaces of Enunciation: Visual Art, ‘Phenomenotechnique,’ and ‘Criticality’ – Towards a Postcolonial Media(l) Theory
Rania Gaafar
Biographies of Authors