Postmodern culture is usually defined as an age of mechanical reproduction and mechanical degeneration characterized by the eradication of performative aura. This article argues that a crucial distinction should be made between the `anti-auratic' arguments of mainstream 20th-century cultural theory (discussed here in terms of the writings of Benjamin, Baudrillard and Virilio), and the regenerative auratic tradition in 20th-century avant-garde performance (discussed here in terms of the successive explorations of the multimediated body in the work of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, (...) the French sound poet Henri Chopin and the Australian cybernetic body artist, Stelarc). If Baudrillard's and Virilio's most extreme hypotheses argue that postmodern technology reduces the body to the condition of the handicapped, Marinetti, Chopin and Stelarc all demonstrate how technological modifications of the body reinforce the impact of installation art and performance art exploring (and manifesting) individual identity. Significantly, the most interesting subtexts in Benjamin's, Baudrillard's and Virilio's arguments all qualify their accounts of the alleged `death' of aura, and in Baudrillard's case now emphasize the ways in which photography `rediscovers' aura. (shrink)

. ‘Moving at the speed of life?’ A cultural kinematics of telematic times and corporate values. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 320-339.

This paper is presented as a performance between the two authors who are discussing the notion of daydreaming as a transitional space between their research interests in dreams and the semantic associations of conscious thought. The first half concerns the logical, rational awake mind when applied to an understanding of daydreaming as a bridge between one state and another. It investigates the idea of the interactive interface as a parallel with the daydream where both enable a middle ground, or safe (...) space for crossing-over. The difficulty highlighted through the performative reading of the paper is to keep focus without slipping into the interstitial state of a daydream. The paper gently drifts towards the second half, which explores understanding of dreamstates and the neuroscientific models of the unconscious brain. (shrink)

This paper will investigate the anonymous collective of skilled artists which created an immersive work of art of a high order in the Abside (Apse) of the Grotte de Lascaux. The Apse is a roundish, semi-spherical, penumbra-like chamber (like those adjacent to romanesque basiliques) approximately 4.5 metres in diameter (about 5 yards) covered on every wall surface (including the ceiling) with thousands of entangled, overlapping, engraved drawings (Leroi-Gourhan, 1968, p. 315) for which, on request, I received a very unique privilege (...) of seeing, though far too briefly. (shrink)

3rd in the thread: between intention & attention.40.6700º N, 73.9400º W.

The natural or biological world often provides models of the simplicity, elegance and complex interactivity that we seek to impart to our technologies, buildings and artworks. Within discussions of form, materials or functionality, we look to the world of insects, animals, plants and even our own bodies for solutions and innovation. Though we may work with the organisms themselves, the first step usually involves a rupture of context, a mutation of interdependent being into a discrete object, a model for the (...) extraction of desired characteristics. The reality of embedded wild growth, with its complexity and interrelation, has often been described in terms of infestation or of ‘nature taking over,’ a challenge to our dominance of the world. However, a closer study of this interpenetration of uncontrolled nature within spaces around us reveals our immediate surroundings to be both wilder and more alive than we often presume them to be. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically (...) fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

The form of life which has the desire for or will to control over emergence at its core is, if not the dominant, then at least one of the more significant ones in late modern culture. To be in control over emergence requires a considerable degree of sovereignty. In this contribution I have made an attempt to outline and contrast three rather basic images or models of what might be called radical sovereignty, i.e., the vital-reflexive-transgressive one (which is referred to (...) here as Nietzsche type 1), the existential-reflective-transcendent one (Nietzsche type 2), and the ambivalent-creative-transformative one (Nietzsche type 3). The analysis of paintings by post-war artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Paul Rebeyrolle is used to illustrate how the aforementioned types of radical sovereignty may have emerged, fully-fledged, in art, in the wake of the Second World War. (shrink)

This essay presents some thoughts on schizoanalysis and visual culture around the proposition that cinema survives in the digital age as a type of image that, after the movement-image and the time-image, could be called the neuro-image. By considering clinical schizophrenia as ‘degree zero’ of schizoanalysis in a more critical sense, a reading of The Butterfly Effect unfolds the temporal dimensions of schizoanalysis as typical for a definition of ‘the neuro-image’. The argument is that the neuro-image speaks from the (always (...) speculative) future. (shrink)

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Stendhal Syndrome'. In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that (...) Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film. In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer. In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

This article provides an introductory overview of the theories of Paul Virilio, particularly regarding how technologically-enhanced speed impacts human reality. It positions Virilio as part modernist, part postmodernist and discusses how his ethico-political views color his more aesthetic metaphysics, creating a tension in his final position on the merits of technological speed's blurring of the real and the imaginary. It concludes by contrasting Virilio's position with some comments on aesthetics by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

My thesis concerns the fate of the spiritual capacities of human beings in the time of digital media systems in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler’s framing of the problem is situated within his ambigious, or pharmacological, approach to technology, in which it is simultaneously poison and cure. It is also founded on his notion of ‘originary technicity’, in which humanity and technology ‘invent’ each other. Both avoid a reductive reading of human-technological relations. Stiegler’s account of subjectivity is (...) one founded on the linguistic, philosophical and sociological notions of agency whereby the self is conceived as a performance within the symbolic and aesthetic order of culture. This performance necessitates a public stage akin to that of the Greek tragic age that allows its audience to reflect upon and question their society in order for the society to remain ethically reflexive. Yet, the growth of mass culture and global consumerism threatens this reflexivity and must be recovered. The generalized proletarianization of the consumer age is one that compromises the acting out of spirit due to the exhaustion of human drives. Furthermore, the social fabric, as with the fabric of the self, is a composition of tendencies, a ‘weaving’ of social bonds that is created by society and its individuals. Therefore, as with the reflexive public stage, society must have the requisite knowledge and ability to interpret and create this production of the social. In a digital age, this must now be a society of ‘image-readers’. By looking at Stiegler’s theorizing of a new contributive economy, I examine the elevating possibilities that can come out of the disindividuating processes of hyper-industrial, consumer-driven technology, and, therefore, what spiritually expressive and transformative performances of self, and society, digital media enable. I argue the aesthetic performance of the self must be one in which the individual is an amateur artist aware of the reflexive social stage that digital platforms provide. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)