Search results for ""diaphanes""

An exploration of the digital revolution in traditional audiovisual media. Over the last two decades, the field of audiovisual media has changed dramatically. Until recently, there was only a small number of technologies, distribution channels were few, and moving images were largely limited to cinemas, televisions, galleries, or art museums. Also, both the producers and the audiences of such content clearly identified as human beings. Those days are over. The digitization of image production and distribution ushered in a massive disruption to the traditional landscape of the moving image that had existed since the advent of the audiovisual industry. Touching on discussions such as child producers, the marketing interests of big corporations, and the origins of new media formats and practices, Display, Distribute, Disrupt​ maps the new conditions for creative work in the ever-widening sphere of audiovisual media.

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Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) remains one of the most influential and yet least understood figures in the history of German thought and literature. Throughout his life, he had major influence on figures as diverse as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and a host of others. Hamann is also one of the most difficult-to-read authors in the German language, writing in an ultracondensed, hyperallusive language for which he became infamous—and which his detractors constantly used to dismiss him. Today, Hamann has been picked up by literary theorists as a precursor of the linguistic turn. The Last Mask focuses on Hamann’s final work, Entkleidung und Verklärung (1786), which was consciously conceived of as an “Abschluss” of his “kleine Autorschaft” and a final defense against his critics. Equally philological and theoretical, it identifies a number of previously unnoticed manuscript alterations that help answer some long-standing questions in Hamann scholarship as well as open new doors for inquiry. Importantly, the manuscripts show that Hamann is one of the earliest theorists of the virtual in our sense of the word today, using the word “virtualiter” to describe his own theory. He links this theory with the concept of the mask or disguise, and conceives of texts as fabrics or textiles composed of threads and strings. The philological focus is on Hamann’s understanding of intertextuality, and on the basis of his dominant string images his notion of virtuality is brought into conversation with Deleuze’s idea of a plane of immanence through the image of a skein of immanence, a knotted bundle of thread which solidifies into a three-dimensional virtual space—a new perspective in contemporary discussions surrounding the nature of virtuality.

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Upon the “discovery of childhood,” as named by Philippe Ariès, bourgeois culture and modern literature marked out an arcane realm that, while scarcely accessible for adults, acted as a space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse ideological purposes: childhood. As this book reveals, from the eighteenth century onwards, the child increasingly came into focus in literature as a mysterious creature. Now the child seems a strange being, constantly unsettling and alienating, although exposed to ongoing territorialization. This is possible because the space of ‘childhood’ is essentially blank and indefinite. Modernity, therefore, has discovered it as a zone, in the words of Friedrich Schiller of “boundless determinability."

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Staging an exhibition as choreography, as drama, as opera, as a place where reality, politics, aesthetics, art, film, and music can address the issues of our day through documentaries, dialogues, science, activism, and creativity: This is the dream, the idea, and the mission of the “refaire le monde” exhibition trilogy at Helmhaus Zürich. The exhibition involves some eighty different authorial voices, bringing diverse attitudes and actions into the safe space of the museum. This book is both a documentation of these new values and new worlds and a guide to them. It is people-focused, positing the arts as the model for a new human reality. Refaire le monde features many artists, including: Ursula Biemann, Pascale Birchler, Corina Gamma, Vincent Glanzmann, Fabrice Gygi, A. C. Kupper, Asia Andrzejka Merlin, Gianni Motti, Tanja Roscic, Heidi Specogna, Bertold Stallmach, and many more, as well as all those who participated in various parallel events.

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The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting “performance” as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices—such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived—this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.

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Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art’s social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality—not only of art.The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an “Ethnology of the White Man” together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity—into the “Neolithic Childhood” mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein’s own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality.With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lütticken, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schüttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian ZeidlerWith reproductions of artworks by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Höch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, André Masson, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibé, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vézelay and others.

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When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges. In some ways, the digital age seems to have brought the goals of the Enlightenment to their fullest fruition, giving us boundless and instantaneous access to every kind of knowledge and art. But the internet and its platforms also frequently bring chaos, immersing us in a sphere of often unverified information whose scope is unimaginable. This book takes a tour through the current debates on digital culture, bringing together a wide array of perspectives from aesthetic theory, cultural studies, electronic media, and the arts.

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Une clinique psychiatrique perchée en haut d’une montagne. Ce lieu futuriste tout en transparence dispose d’une entrée, mais il est impossible d’en sortir. Interdiction de surcroît de regarder à travers les parois de verre : les patients comme le personnel soignant y doivent se confronter à leur propre solitude. Ainsi, le docteur Franz von Stern, s’efforce tant bien que mal de rédiger le rapport sur sa propre personne exigé par la direction. Mais la conviction de cet homme, à la fois schizophrène et bionique – puisque affublé d‘un deuxième cortex et d‘un médiator greffé – que remuer son passé constitue la première des pathologies psychiques, sera bouleversée par l‘arrivée d’une patiente étrangère à ce microcosme aux usages bien rodés… Entre Orwell et Foucault, l’auteure dépeint une vision aussi jouissive que féroce d’un monde « new-age » fasciné par la technologie, où le culte du « bien-être » devient l’une des formes les plus raffinées et redoutables de contrôle social. Ce second roman d’Angelika Meier, jubilatoire et inventif, évite l’écueil du « roman à thèse » ainsi que tout académisme. La même année, encensé par la critique, ce « roman anti-psychiatrique par excellence » a été sélectionné pour le prestigieux Prix du livre allemand.

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What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

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At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations. Kierkegaard and the Mermaid takes a “leap into the absurd,” exploring the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard from the bottom of the sea, through the eyes of a princess with a fish’s tail. Though living in a coral palace and betrothed to the handsomest and tenderest of all the water sprites, our heroine soon finds herself heartbroken. She must look deep into the world of the spirit to find out what it all means.

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Interdisciplinary studies that combine the current of materialist thinking with discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. Placed at the intersection of art, media, and cultural studies as well as economic theory, Liquidity, Flows, Circulation investigates the cultural logic of environmentalization. As flows, circulations, and liquidity resurface in all aspects of recent culture and contemporary art, this volume investigates the hypothesis of a genuine cultural logic of environmentalization through these three concepts. It thus brings together two areas of research that have been largely separate. On the one hand, this volume takes up discussions about ecologies with and without nature and environmentalization as a contemporary form of power and capital. On the other hand, it takes its cue from Fredric Jameson’s notion that each stage of capitalism is accompanied by a genuine cultural logic. The volume introduces this current of materialist thinking into the ongoing discussions of ecologies and environmentalization. By analyzing contemporary art, architecture, theater, films, and literature, the fifteen contributions by scholars and artists explore different fields where liquid forms, semantics flow, or processes of circulation emerge as a contemporary cultural logic.

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During the 17th and 18th centuries, foreign material culture was introduced into France and Switzerland and integrated into European interiors and decorative arts. Scholars have emphasized this era’s emerging taste for the exotic in order to explain the unprecedented craze for lacquer, porcelain, and textiles that imitated non-Western techniques and iconography. Yet what constituted the exotic during the age of Enlightenment? How was the place of foreign material culture negotiated? And how did it impact European identities? Exotic Switzerland? moves from questions about the nature of exoticism to explore exoticism in practice. The physical relocation of material fragments in European interiors is the core of this volume. Finally, the contributors also explore the rise of disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology through collection, publication, and print culture.

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In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.

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In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spectacle, presented in and around the real Winter Palace in Petrograd, was intended to recall the storming as the beginning of the October Revolution. But it was a deceptive reenactment because, in producing the events it sought to reenact, it created a new kind of theater, agit-drama, promulgating political propaganda and deliberately breaking down the distinction between performers and spectators.Nikolaj Evreinov: "The Storming of the Winter Palace" tells the fascinating story of this production. Taking readers through the relevant history, the authors describe the role of The Storming of the Winter Palace in commemorating Soviet power. With a wealth of illustrations, they also show how photographs of Evreinov's theatrical storming eventually became historical documents of the October Revolution themselves.

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Founded in 1904, Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum houses a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. This book raises questions about the relationship between the museum's educational and scientific aims and global trade.

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Affect, or the process by which emotions come to be embodied, is a burgeoning area of interest in both the humanities and the sciences. For Timing of Affect, Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bosel, and Michaela Ott have assembled leading scholars to explore the temporal aspects of affect through the perspectives of philosophy, music, film, media, and art, as well as technology and neurology. The contributions address possibilities for affect as a capacity of the body; as an anthropological inscription and a primary, ontological conjunctive and disjunctive process; as an interruption of chains of stimulus and response; and as an arena within cultural history for political, media, and psychopharmacological interventions. Showing how these and other temporal aspects of affect are articulated both throughout history and in contemporary society, the editors then explore the implications for the current knowledge structures surrounding affect today.

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The digital drawings of Yves Netzhammer invite viewers into a fascinating world of figures that appear both human and animal, while simultaneously blurring the distinction between object and living thing. By turns nightmarish or playful and cartoon-like, the creative cosmos depicted in Netzhammer's drawings imagines an alternate reality, in which precise lines bind impossible combinations of objects with careful clarity. Netzhammer ranks among the most renowned Swiss contemporary artists, his work comprising animation, video and sculptural installations, objects, and drawings. Concave Thoughts is a comprehensive resource on his work and imagery as well as an opulent art book.

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Unique digital drawings from one of Switzerland’s most prolific artists of today. Since early in his career, the Swiss artist Yves Netzhammer has used digital drawings as the basis of his work, which oscillates between sculpture and the moving image. Lines drawn into a space in abeyance visualize his figurative thought and beguile the viewer into bizarre, comical, and eerie associations. Netzhammer’s refined and precise pictorial rhetoric plays a subtle game that permits the viewer a variety of interpretations and continually evades the deceptive moment of unambiguity. This results in images in which complexity and levity, formal strictness, or conceptual proliferation come to the front depending on one’s point of view.Convex Thoughts is a bibliographical space that complements its predecessor, Concave Thoughts—together they are a guide for dreamers and musers, an endless storyboard from an art at the highs and lows of its time.

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