Digital, video and new media arts Books

Book Synopsis How do the temporal and dynamic patterns of media forms and practices create complex constructions of meaning, identity and value? How can we describe the way cinematic images generate and transform the affectively grounded structures that survey, confirm or revise a political community’s horizon of values? Using the exemplary case of feelings of guilt, the author develops an approach that makes patterns of audiovisual compositions intelligible as aesthetic modulations of moral feelings. A sense of guilt is presented here as neither an individualistic psychological emotion nor an external social mechanism of control but as a paradigmatic case for understanding politics and history as based upon embodied affectivity and shared relations to the world. By taking three distinct examples – German Post-War cinema, Hollywood Western and films on climate change – patterns of audiovisual composition and the inherent calculation of affect are analyzed as practices shaping the conditions of possibility of political communities and their historicity.

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Book SynopsisStrategies of Playful Resistance Within the Consumer Society Guy Ben Ner makes a lot out of very little, radically integrating both himself and his private surroundings into his work. His family’s apartment in Tel Aviv serves as a film location for the video artist, as do the aisles of a furniture store. In these often grotesque settings, the influence of economics and politics on the most intimate human relationships becomes apparent. In conversation with his close friend and fellow artist Christian Jankowski, Ben Ner provides insight into the process of creating his works. For what seems improvised is based on months of research and draws on an extensive knowledge of film history, and it is this discrepancy between improvised situations and the rigor of his artistic concepts that characterizes his work. Using terms such as “aesthetics,” “fantasy,” “family,” or “citation,” curator Fanni Fetzer develops an alphabet of resistance in Ben Ner’s oeuvre. Consequently, this publication aims to convey the artist’s clear political stance and his strategy of playful resistance.

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