Search results for ""diaphanes""

A history of the pioneering years establishing a new genre in the field of arts: artistic research. Artistic work connects multiple competencies, areas of knowledge, and ways of life. The Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) has made this principle its guiding ethos through organizing research projects in correspondence with this transgressive gesture, manifesting as interdisciplinary, networked knowledge production.Inventory and Hinge offers an overview of the research projects performed over the last two decades at IFCAR through project descriptions, plentiful illustrations, and, most importantly, links and QR codes that grant access to nearly all publications and websites that were created by the individual projects he discusses. Although art as research has a long tradition outside of institutions, Inventory and Hinge chronicles IFCAR’s drive to introduce this new discipline and establish a new artistic genre.

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The first-ever English translation of this dramatic work by Nikolai Evreinov. In the 1910s the Russian theater director and theorist Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953) insisted on the theatricalization of life. Twenty years later, Evreinov, who had left Russia in 1924, was in exile in Paris when Stalin staged three elaborate political show trials in Moscow. Evreinov then meticulously read the transcripts of the trials in the Russian-language press, collected material on Nikolai Bukharin and the other defendants, consulted with experts, and finally wrote a play, his response to the staging of a judicial farce. With this response, he also wanted to rehabilitate his idea of the theatricalization of life. After all, the theatricalization of life does not mean performing false confessions, constructing conspiracies, fabricating facts, or casting hired witnesses. In his theatrical theory, Evreinov was careful not to make the theater of life invisible. His play is therefore not a historical reconstruction, but an imaginary look behind the scenes, in which the Stalinist perpetrators confess to the real crime in the end: the theater. Expertly translated into English for the first time by Zachary King, The Steps of Nemesis brings a fascinating play to a whole new world.

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There is a new quality of idiocy today. While the old idiot derived knowledge from isolation, the new idiot refuses all understanding of the world. A figure of systematic incompetence, the new idiot is impacting global culture and politics alike, giving rise to surprising, often absurd competences. Yesterday’s “fake news” or “post-truths” can be read today as evidence of an ongoing transformation of self-politics in which the idiotic impulse is redefining our experience of the world. Despite talk of global awareness, the isolated self of the many is all the more effective. It brings about a culture of happy singletons strolling towards a black hole that has become their substitute for society. Zoran ​Terzić’s wide-ranging essay takes up the figure of the idiot and follows its numerous appearances throughout intellectual history in an examination of the “art of the idiotic” that both reflects and transcends the freneticism of the present.

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Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world’s visual form. Projectionists examines mostly unknown aspects of Muybridge’s work: his period as a touring projectionist who enthralled audiences with unprecedented moving-images and his creation of a moving-image auditorium—long before cinemas—in which to project his work at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. That auditorium was both a catastrophe and a vital precursor for the following century’s manias for projection. Based on new research into his travels, audiences, auditoria, and projectors, Projectionists explores Muybridge’s initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps his driving inspiration for subsequent filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further World’s Exposition events and cinemas’ overheated projection-boxes.

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In the wake of rapid globalization, many enthusiastically declared cosmopolitanism to be no longer just a philosophical ideal, but a real, existing fact. Across the world, they argued, people were increasingly considering themselves global citizens. Meanwhile, the global ecological crisis worsened, fascism returned, repression of disenfranchised groups on a global scale persisted, and the “refugee crisis” inundated the mediascape. What happened to the cosmopolitan promise, and who betrayed it? minor cosmopolitan challenges the underlying premises of major cosmopolitanism without letting go of the unfulfilled emancipatory potential of the concept at large. It rethinks cosmopolitanisms in the plural, and it traces multiple origins and trajectories of cosmopolitan thought across the globe. Assembling theoretical, artistic, and essayistic contributions in textual or visual formats, minor cosmopolitan seeks to discuss how to live at once with our difference and shared struggle and asks who sustains the world’s flourishing.

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Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the other, it is criticized for being an instrument of state oppression. Legal criticism’s strategies to deal with this ambivalence differ greatly. While some seek to transcend the institution of law altogether, others advocate a transformation of the form of law or try to employ strategies to change the content of law, deconstruct its basis, or invent rights. By presenting a variety of approaches to legal criticism, What’s Legit? highlights transitions and exhibits irreconcilable differences of these approaches. Ultimately, What’s Legit? broadens debates that are all too often conducted only within the boundaries of separate theoretical currents.

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Pynchon's Sound of Music is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon’s work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph employs a variety of disciplines—from literary studies and musicology to philosophy, media theory, and history—to explain Pynchon through music and music through Pynchon. Encyclopedic and eclectic in its approach, Pynchon’s Sound of Music discusses the author’s use of instruments such as the kazoo, harmonica, and saxophone and embarks on close readings of the most salient and musically tantalizing passages. Zooming out to a bird’s eye view, Christian Hänggi puts Pynchon’s historical musical references and allusions into perspective to trace the trends and tendencies in the development of the author’s interest in music. A treasure trove for fans and an invaluable source for future scholarship, this book includes the Pynchon Playlist, a catalog of over 900 musical references in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and an exhaustive index of more than 700 appearances of musical instruments.

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In Necroperformance, Dorata Sajewska proposes an innovative perspective for looking back at the formative process of Polish modernity, delving into repressed areas of experience connected with World War I and the ensuing emancipatory movements. Underpinning modern Polish nationhood, she reveals, is not only a Romantic myth of independence but also the up-close horrors of fratricidal warfare and the pacifist aspirations of those confronted with its violence. Searching for traces of memory in precarious bodies inflicted with the violence of war, Necroperformance implores us to acknowledge the fragility of life as it actively reinforces an attitude of respect for the right to live. Sajewska constructs here an alternative culture archive, conjuring it from compoundly-mediatized historical remnants--bodies, documents, artworks, and cultural writings--that demand to be recognized in non-canonical reflection on our past. Her chief objective is to understand the social impact of remains and their place in culture, and by examining the body and corporality in artistic practices, social and cultural performances, she strives to identify both the fragmentariness of memory and the discontinuity of history, and finally, to reinstate the body's (or its documental remains') historical and political dimension.

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After the Crisis offers a platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today. Contributors come from the realms of critical theory, fiction, performance art, fashion photography, and museums, as well as film and design, and their conversations bring together history and the contemporary. Comparing the current situation of photographic images with the crisis experienced by representation at the time of the birth of photography, they set our relationship with photographic images in the digital era in perspective. Through these discussions, we come to sense the existential burden of being surrounded by images, while also beginning to grasp the historical depth of a questioning of images that started long before the current generation and engages with crucial political and cultural issues of our time.

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We know Isaac Newton as a brilliant polymath, inventor of the calculus and the person who first began to suss out the fundamental laws of physics. But in this delightful account of his life and thought aimed at young readers, we learn oh, so much more about Newton and his secret life . . . on the dark side of the moon. Newton and the Club of Astronomers invites us on a wildly imaginative journey to join Newton as he meets with the famous (and definitely secret) Club of Astronomers in their clubhouse on the hidden side of the moon. At the Club's meetings, we learn about Newton's discoveries and understand his pioneering thoughts about gravity, planetary orbits, and much, much more. Whimsical and fanciful, yet firmly rooted in Newton's actual ideas and discoveries, Newton and the Club of Astronomers is the perfect introduction for curious children to one of the great figures of scientific history.

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Vienna, 1714: Late in life, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the universal genius of his time, puts down his pen and declares his description of the universe to be complete. In the evening, he sits in his study room among letters, books, and manuscripts as his young friend Theodor comes for a visit. Theodor is bothered by one question: Why is there evil? And why do people commit crimes? With an example from ancient Greek mythology, Leibniz develops his theory about the best of all possible worlds. With this vivid “story within a story” Jean Paul Mongin successfully imparts the complex philosophical ideas of Leibniz to young readers. 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.

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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. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, Dr. Freud notices a peculiar phrase in pages of his notebook: "preaching to the fishes." What could he have meant by this? If there's one thing he has learned working as a psychoanalyst, it's that the best way to make sense of yourself is through your dreams and so he settles down for a nice long nap. But no sooner does his head hit the pillow than he begins to hear voices! A frightened fish with a childhood memory lodged in its throat coaxes Dr. Freud into the cold water, where his ideas come to life through an unforgettable cast of characters, including a loquacious carp and three frogs Id, Ego, and Superego locked in fierce competition for a single waterlily.

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Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata—the initiator of the “Butoh” performance art and the seminal figure in Japan’s experimental arts culture of the 1960s—created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil, his experimental film projects and his horror and erotic films uniquely invoking the intensity of the decade. Based on original interviews with Hijikata’s collaborators as well as new research, Film’s Ghosts illuminates Hijikata’s work against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo. This will be an essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan’s experimental art and its histories.

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Since its beginnings in the 1990s, artistic research has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance, or performance art. But from its beginnings—under labels like “art and science” or “scienceart” or “artscience” that mention both disciplines in one breath—it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term. Further, this manifesto defends the radical potential of artistic research against those who toy all too carefully with university formats, wishing to ally their work with scientific principles. Its aim is to emphasize the autonomy and particular intellectuality of artistic research, without seeking to justify its legitimacy or adopt alien standards.

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Erich Hörl's Sacred Channels is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of the sacred and the primitive. Hörl offers insight into the shared ground of anthropology and media theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and presents an archeology of the philosophy of technology that underpins contemporary culture. This singular and unique project focuses on the ethnological disciplines and their phantasmatic imaginations of a prealphabetical realm of the sacred and the primitive but reads them in the context of media cultural questions as epistemic unconscious and as projections of the emerging postalphabetical condition. Drawing inspiration from work by the likes of Friedrich Kittler, Hörl's understanding of cybernetics in the post-World War II interdisciplinary field informs a rich analysis that is of interest to media scholars and to anyone seeking to understand the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the humanities in the age of technical media.

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