Freud is concerned to argue polemically against the location of [Hoffman's story's] uncanny effec... more Freud is concerned to argue polemically against the location of [Hoffman's story's] uncanny effect in the figure of "the living doll" Olympia [...] Freud's alternative reading privileges instead the Sandman (who as Freud points out gives his name to the story) over Olympia the doll-woman, as the source of the feeling of the claims, is the refiguration in fantasy of the universal male Oedipal situation of childhood and its accompanying castration complex [...].' This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. See Freud, 'The "uncanny"', pp. 222-23.
Basta, c'è da ridere. Ah oscure tortuosità che spingono a un «destino d'opposizione»! Ma non c'è ... more Basta, c'è da ridere. Ah oscure tortuosità che spingono a un «destino d'opposizione»! Ma non c'è altra alternativa alle mie opere future [Enough, this is laughable. Oh obscure Entanglements that push to a "destiny of opposition" There is no other alternative for my future work] (Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Il progetto di future opere", in Pasolini 1982, p.198) Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the most prominent dissident Italian intellectual of the 1960s and early 1970s. The targets of Pasolini's criticism were many and distributed across the political spectrum: globalisation, mainstream neoliberalism, the Catholicism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the students' bourgeois intellectualism, and Operaismo-the Italian Marxist workerism movements. For example, in his 1968 poem "The Communist Party to the Young" on the violent struggle between the student movement and the Roman police, Pasolini took the side of the police. He acknowledged that the police were on the wrong side, but supported them "because they [were] the sons of the poor", unlike the students whom he saw as bourgeois. Similarly, in 1975 he vehemently reacted to the debates over the legalisation of abortion, since it equated sexuality and life with consumption in the culture of disposability. Writing before the legalisation of abortion, Pasolini (see 1981, p.98) stated, "Oggi la libertà sessuale della maggioranza è in realtà una convenzione, un obbligo, un dovere sociale, un'ansia sociale, una caratteristica irrinunciabile della qualità di vita del consumatore [Today the sexual liberation of the majority of people is, in reality, a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, an inalienable factor in the life of the consumer]." This, however, did not stop Pasolini from developing a Marxist critique of capital (mainly through Gramsci) or aligning himself with Lotta Continua-the new radical Left in the early 1970s. The unconventional positions he developed in relation to progressive and radical politics make it difficult to situate him in the postwar trajectory of the European Left, even in that fractured landscape generated by the clashes between the traditional Marxist-Leninist Communist parties, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and emerging workerist and autonomist movements. On account of his open homosexuality, the PCI's traditional Stalinist Left considered him a "degenerate bourgeois". An article in the party's newsletter, l'Unità, on 29 October 1949 explained, La federazione del Pci di Pordenone ha deliberato in data 26 ottobre l'espulsione dal partito del Dott. Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa per indegnità morale. Prendiamo spunto dai fatti che hanno determinato un grave provvedimento disciplinare a carico del poeta Pasolini per denunciare ancora una volta le deleterie influenze di certe correnti ideologiche e filosofiche dei vari Gide, Sartre e di altrettanto decantati poeti e letterati, che si vogliono atteggiare a progressisti, ma che in realtà raccolgono i più deleteri aspetti della degenerazione Borghese. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is in the Department of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, University of California at Davis, USA. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota, 2001), has completed a book on Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe, and is currently working on the Spectres of the Digital. She has published articles on film, digital culture, and performance art in Screen, Camera Obscura, Representations, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Film Quarterly, Performance Arts Journal, Third Text, and numerous other journals and collected volumes.
This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the i... more This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects' own absence or lack of wholeness, nor to its own possible obsolescence. Rather, it points to the disjuncture between recognizing and reacting to the fact that we are being followed (by images, interfaces, and tracking devices), and recognizing and reacting to the fact that these devices already anticipate our movements, desires, and trajectories. Lozano-Hemmer's work asks about how surveillance systems, global capital, and digital technologies have reconfigured notions of embodiment and public space, and of the public itself.
Made on the eve of Greece's entry into the European Community in 1981, Theo Angelopoulos'... more Made on the eve of Greece's entry into the European Community in 1981, Theo Angelopoulos's Megalexandros does not acquiesce to the political mood of the moment but foregrounds Greece's status as a crypto-colony or client state. Set at the turn of the century, the film reminds its viewers of the role of Great Britain, France, and Russia in the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), as well as of their ongoing gunboat diplomacy in Greek national politics. Megalexandros is loosely based on the 1870 Dilessi Affair, which involved the kidnapping and eventual murder of a group of British aristocrats and one Italian count by Greek bandits at Marathon. Angelopoulos claims that Megalexandros is one of the simplest films he has made because it follows a linear narrative, but the interweaving of numerous citations of poems, tragedies, histories, and iconographies, as well as references to traditional oral narratives and local customs, make the film extremely complex and nuanced. Complex historical, ideological, and aesthetic references used in the film will be analyzed in order to show how Angelopoulos makes a critical contribution to the on-going debates about European identity politics.
When confronted by the camera poised to capture his image, Roland Barthes famously reflected: “I ... more When confronted by the camera poised to capture his image, Roland Barthes famously reflected: “I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” For Barthes the encounter of the signifier (the cinematic apparatus) with the signified (the face) always results in an inauthentic pose before the camera. In 20 Cigarettes (2011), and Two Faces (2010), James Benning takes a different approach this encounter. These two moving-image works do not point to the instantaneous yet inauthentic moment in time recorded for posterity, rather they point to the shifting architecture of the close-up, its untimely duration, and the ungrounding of the pose itself. Two Faces stretches two three-second close-up shots of a face (one woman and one man) into a twenty-minute installation piece. These portraits have been digitally scanned from footage Benning shot on 16mm in 1973. The scanning process makes these seemingly still portraits change in color and brightn...
Jacques Ranciere has argued that art and the artist must “emancipate the spectator” from what he ... more Jacques Ranciere has argued that art and the artist must “emancipate the spectator” from what he sees as the pedantic criticism of the postmodern anti-aesthetic movement of the early 1980s (as articulated by Douglas Crimp and Hal Foster) that sought to position art as both political and critical of the commercialization of art. What he proposes instead is that art (including film) should produce a tension between contemporary political reality and aesthetics, freeing the spectator from “theoretical and political presuppositions.” Yet, it is not clear how this contemporary turn away from art as a critical engagement with contemporary aesthetics and politics can make sense of film that appropriates radical or political film of the past, where there already is certain recognition or knowing in looking. The work of repetition cannot claim to give us a new image of truth or to resurrect some historical political reality. It suspends the very principle of reality, by pointing out that th...
... THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS ... University of Minnesota Press/Minneapolis London THE U... more ... THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS ... University of Minnesota Press/Minneapolis London THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS Kriss Ravetto This One 2X5S-240-DSLS ...
1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-em... more 1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-emerged to describe the area between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, yet often does not include modem Turkey. The word itself is Turkish meaning 'wooded hills', describing the region ...
In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist erotici... more In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, ...
While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was unspectacular, it made its p... more While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films-from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), to Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (1999). What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also a shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination (exemplified by Hollywood) that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film (1999), D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers (2016), and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost (2017) are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs (the figures of Madeleine, the spiral, the copy or fake, and the fetish), themes (liebestod, obsession, the uncanny) and strategies (mirroring, duplicity, and disorientation) ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated.
In Theatre and its Double Artaud explored how the plague communicates beyond simple contact, brin... more In Theatre and its Double Artaud explored how the plague communicates beyond simple contact, bringing death to those it touches, but also bringing fear, images, and the imagination, which transforms social relations , disorganising society and producing absurd antisocial actions. In this essay we would like to relate the emergence of a parasite-cinema, one that expresses itself through predatory forms of capture and communication , where images pullulate out of control (but do not destroy the body of the host), to Artaud's understanding of plague as a proliferation of communication. Résumé Dans Le Théâtre et son double Artaud analyse la manière dont la peste communique au-delà du seul contact
This essay argues that the digital uncanny borrows and remediates three features of the Freudian ... more This essay argues that the digital uncanny borrows and remediates three features of the Freudian Uncanny: an adherence to realist aesthetics; the structural repetition of images, situations and responses; and how surveillance undermines the features used to describe feelings of omnipotence and paranoia. By recycling these features, each artist binds realism, repetition and the uncertainty of power to the uncanny itself, leaving us only with their indeterminacy. Such uncertainties strip the body of its positioning as a locus of sensation, perception, and recollection, which in turn strips thought of its presuppositions, like the assumption that it is solely a human faculty. By uncoupling bodies and thinking from forms of representation – bodily images and images of thought – body and thought are themselves rendered indeterminate, ungrounded and uncanny. My goal is to examine how these interactive installations transform subjectivity and our visceral sense of embodiment into an act of mediation.
1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-em... more 1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-emerged to describe the area between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, yet often does not include modem Turkey. The word itself is Turkish meaning 'wooded hills', describing the region ...
Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has provoked debates to the use of cinematic affect in th... more Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has provoked debates to the use of cinematic affect in the production of historical consciousness, and the role of montage in the production of memory. This chapter shows how the video-essay recites many arguments without producing decisive forms of representation, whether in the form of redemption, eternal damnation, the figure of excess, the law of purity, or the absence of the image. By naming the first two segments of the video-essay, Toutes les histoires and Une histoire seule, Godard asks us to think if there is a “proper” way to historicize events like the Holocaust. Histoire(s) du cinéma does not offer us an image of the resurrection/redemption of the image as much as its reanimation/return. This might be why we only see the hand of Christ – that is the gesture of the hand that invokes the title of the painting Noli me tangere.
Well before the emergence of postcolonial studies, Pasolini dedicated many films, poems, and essa... more Well before the emergence of postcolonial studies, Pasolini dedicated many films, poems, and essays to criticizing conventional dichotomies between North and South, East and West, Left and Right, subjectivity and otherness. He exposed the aporia of creating difference on a model of recognition that was already flawed by grounding its own subject as the unthought in thought. He advocated an alternative: the rethinking of the other as a form of resistance (“a new anthropological type”), and unthinking of political discourse to legitimize (recognize) those who are already in power. His poetry and cinema still provides a powerful example of the type of critical work needed to unthink the deleterious narratives enabled by such dichotomies. It also shows how cinema can be a tool for theorizing alternative politics.
Freud is concerned to argue polemically against the location of [Hoffman's story's] uncanny effec... more Freud is concerned to argue polemically against the location of [Hoffman's story's] uncanny effect in the figure of "the living doll" Olympia [...] Freud's alternative reading privileges instead the Sandman (who as Freud points out gives his name to the story) over Olympia the doll-woman, as the source of the feeling of the claims, is the refiguration in fantasy of the universal male Oedipal situation of childhood and its accompanying castration complex [...].' This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. See Freud, 'The "uncanny"', pp. 222-23.
Basta, c'è da ridere. Ah oscure tortuosità che spingono a un «destino d'opposizione»! Ma non c'è ... more Basta, c'è da ridere. Ah oscure tortuosità che spingono a un «destino d'opposizione»! Ma non c'è altra alternativa alle mie opere future [Enough, this is laughable. Oh obscure Entanglements that push to a "destiny of opposition" There is no other alternative for my future work] (Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Il progetto di future opere", in Pasolini 1982, p.198) Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the most prominent dissident Italian intellectual of the 1960s and early 1970s. The targets of Pasolini's criticism were many and distributed across the political spectrum: globalisation, mainstream neoliberalism, the Catholicism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the students' bourgeois intellectualism, and Operaismo-the Italian Marxist workerism movements. For example, in his 1968 poem "The Communist Party to the Young" on the violent struggle between the student movement and the Roman police, Pasolini took the side of the police. He acknowledged that the police were on the wrong side, but supported them "because they [were] the sons of the poor", unlike the students whom he saw as bourgeois. Similarly, in 1975 he vehemently reacted to the debates over the legalisation of abortion, since it equated sexuality and life with consumption in the culture of disposability. Writing before the legalisation of abortion, Pasolini (see 1981, p.98) stated, "Oggi la libertà sessuale della maggioranza è in realtà una convenzione, un obbligo, un dovere sociale, un'ansia sociale, una caratteristica irrinunciabile della qualità di vita del consumatore [Today the sexual liberation of the majority of people is, in reality, a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, an inalienable factor in the life of the consumer]." This, however, did not stop Pasolini from developing a Marxist critique of capital (mainly through Gramsci) or aligning himself with Lotta Continua-the new radical Left in the early 1970s. The unconventional positions he developed in relation to progressive and radical politics make it difficult to situate him in the postwar trajectory of the European Left, even in that fractured landscape generated by the clashes between the traditional Marxist-Leninist Communist parties, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and emerging workerist and autonomist movements. On account of his open homosexuality, the PCI's traditional Stalinist Left considered him a "degenerate bourgeois". An article in the party's newsletter, l'Unità, on 29 October 1949 explained, La federazione del Pci di Pordenone ha deliberato in data 26 ottobre l'espulsione dal partito del Dott. Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa per indegnità morale. Prendiamo spunto dai fatti che hanno determinato un grave provvedimento disciplinare a carico del poeta Pasolini per denunciare ancora una volta le deleterie influenze di certe correnti ideologiche e filosofiche dei vari Gide, Sartre e di altrettanto decantati poeti e letterati, che si vogliono atteggiare a progressisti, ma che in realtà raccolgono i più deleteri aspetti della degenerazione Borghese. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is in the Department of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, University of California at Davis, USA. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota, 2001), has completed a book on Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe, and is currently working on the Spectres of the Digital. She has published articles on film, digital culture, and performance art in Screen, Camera Obscura, Representations, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Film Quarterly, Performance Arts Journal, Third Text, and numerous other journals and collected volumes.
This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the i... more This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects' own absence or lack of wholeness, nor to its own possible obsolescence. Rather, it points to the disjuncture between recognizing and reacting to the fact that we are being followed (by images, interfaces, and tracking devices), and recognizing and reacting to the fact that these devices already anticipate our movements, desires, and trajectories. Lozano-Hemmer's work asks about how surveillance systems, global capital, and digital technologies have reconfigured notions of embodiment and public space, and of the public itself.
Made on the eve of Greece's entry into the European Community in 1981, Theo Angelopoulos'... more Made on the eve of Greece's entry into the European Community in 1981, Theo Angelopoulos's Megalexandros does not acquiesce to the political mood of the moment but foregrounds Greece's status as a crypto-colony or client state. Set at the turn of the century, the film reminds its viewers of the role of Great Britain, France, and Russia in the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), as well as of their ongoing gunboat diplomacy in Greek national politics. Megalexandros is loosely based on the 1870 Dilessi Affair, which involved the kidnapping and eventual murder of a group of British aristocrats and one Italian count by Greek bandits at Marathon. Angelopoulos claims that Megalexandros is one of the simplest films he has made because it follows a linear narrative, but the interweaving of numerous citations of poems, tragedies, histories, and iconographies, as well as references to traditional oral narratives and local customs, make the film extremely complex and nuanced. Complex historical, ideological, and aesthetic references used in the film will be analyzed in order to show how Angelopoulos makes a critical contribution to the on-going debates about European identity politics.
When confronted by the camera poised to capture his image, Roland Barthes famously reflected: “I ... more When confronted by the camera poised to capture his image, Roland Barthes famously reflected: “I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” For Barthes the encounter of the signifier (the cinematic apparatus) with the signified (the face) always results in an inauthentic pose before the camera. In 20 Cigarettes (2011), and Two Faces (2010), James Benning takes a different approach this encounter. These two moving-image works do not point to the instantaneous yet inauthentic moment in time recorded for posterity, rather they point to the shifting architecture of the close-up, its untimely duration, and the ungrounding of the pose itself. Two Faces stretches two three-second close-up shots of a face (one woman and one man) into a twenty-minute installation piece. These portraits have been digitally scanned from footage Benning shot on 16mm in 1973. The scanning process makes these seemingly still portraits change in color and brightn...
Jacques Ranciere has argued that art and the artist must “emancipate the spectator” from what he ... more Jacques Ranciere has argued that art and the artist must “emancipate the spectator” from what he sees as the pedantic criticism of the postmodern anti-aesthetic movement of the early 1980s (as articulated by Douglas Crimp and Hal Foster) that sought to position art as both political and critical of the commercialization of art. What he proposes instead is that art (including film) should produce a tension between contemporary political reality and aesthetics, freeing the spectator from “theoretical and political presuppositions.” Yet, it is not clear how this contemporary turn away from art as a critical engagement with contemporary aesthetics and politics can make sense of film that appropriates radical or political film of the past, where there already is certain recognition or knowing in looking. The work of repetition cannot claim to give us a new image of truth or to resurrect some historical political reality. It suspends the very principle of reality, by pointing out that th...
... THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS ... University of Minnesota Press/Minneapolis London THE U... more ... THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS ... University of Minnesota Press/Minneapolis London THE UNMAKING OF FASCIST AESTHETICS Kriss Ravetto This One 2X5S-240-DSLS ...
1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-em... more 1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-emerged to describe the area between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, yet often does not include modem Turkey. The word itself is Turkish meaning 'wooded hills', describing the region ...
In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist erotici... more In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, ...
While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was unspectacular, it made its p... more While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films-from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), to Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (1999). What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also a shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination (exemplified by Hollywood) that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film (1999), D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers (2016), and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost (2017) are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs (the figures of Madeleine, the spiral, the copy or fake, and the fetish), themes (liebestod, obsession, the uncanny) and strategies (mirroring, duplicity, and disorientation) ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated.
In Theatre and its Double Artaud explored how the plague communicates beyond simple contact, brin... more In Theatre and its Double Artaud explored how the plague communicates beyond simple contact, bringing death to those it touches, but also bringing fear, images, and the imagination, which transforms social relations , disorganising society and producing absurd antisocial actions. In this essay we would like to relate the emergence of a parasite-cinema, one that expresses itself through predatory forms of capture and communication , where images pullulate out of control (but do not destroy the body of the host), to Artaud's understanding of plague as a proliferation of communication. Résumé Dans Le Théâtre et son double Artaud analyse la manière dont la peste communique au-delà du seul contact
This essay argues that the digital uncanny borrows and remediates three features of the Freudian ... more This essay argues that the digital uncanny borrows and remediates three features of the Freudian Uncanny: an adherence to realist aesthetics; the structural repetition of images, situations and responses; and how surveillance undermines the features used to describe feelings of omnipotence and paranoia. By recycling these features, each artist binds realism, repetition and the uncertainty of power to the uncanny itself, leaving us only with their indeterminacy. Such uncertainties strip the body of its positioning as a locus of sensation, perception, and recollection, which in turn strips thought of its presuppositions, like the assumption that it is solely a human faculty. By uncoupling bodies and thinking from forms of representation – bodily images and images of thought – body and thought are themselves rendered indeterminate, ungrounded and uncanny. My goal is to examine how these interactive installations transform subjectivity and our visceral sense of embodiment into an act of mediation.
1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-em... more 1 I would like to point out a problem with the term 'Balkan', which seems to have re-emerged to describe the area between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, yet often does not include modem Turkey. The word itself is Turkish meaning 'wooded hills', describing the region ...
Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has provoked debates to the use of cinematic affect in th... more Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has provoked debates to the use of cinematic affect in the production of historical consciousness, and the role of montage in the production of memory. This chapter shows how the video-essay recites many arguments without producing decisive forms of representation, whether in the form of redemption, eternal damnation, the figure of excess, the law of purity, or the absence of the image. By naming the first two segments of the video-essay, Toutes les histoires and Une histoire seule, Godard asks us to think if there is a “proper” way to historicize events like the Holocaust. Histoire(s) du cinéma does not offer us an image of the resurrection/redemption of the image as much as its reanimation/return. This might be why we only see the hand of Christ – that is the gesture of the hand that invokes the title of the painting Noli me tangere.
Well before the emergence of postcolonial studies, Pasolini dedicated many films, poems, and essa... more Well before the emergence of postcolonial studies, Pasolini dedicated many films, poems, and essays to criticizing conventional dichotomies between North and South, East and West, Left and Right, subjectivity and otherness. He exposed the aporia of creating difference on a model of recognition that was already flawed by grounding its own subject as the unthought in thought. He advocated an alternative: the rethinking of the other as a form of resistance (“a new anthropological type”), and unthinking of political discourse to legitimize (recognize) those who are already in power. His poetry and cinema still provides a powerful example of the type of critical work needed to unthink the deleterious narratives enabled by such dichotomies. It also shows how cinema can be a tool for theorizing alternative politics.
This seminar will expand and re-balance political conversations about surveillance and espionage ... more This seminar will expand and re-balance political conversations about surveillance and espionage by adding scholarly dimensions from humanistic disciplines and comparative perspectives to a process that is likely to reshape what we mean by democracy. We aim to bring to bear the arts, humanities and social sciences to analyze currently changing legal and cultural notions of privacy, liberty, risk, identity, national interest and security, and how these are not only different across countries and cultures but are also changing in response to the impact of globalization. The seminar will bring together artists, anthropologists, legal scholars, historians, media scholars, political scientists, science and technology studies practitioners, computer scientists, and foreign policy scholars to enrich the political debate around global surveillance and give it a much broader context.
We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny
evoked by parallel proces... more We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated digital technologies. /Digital Uncanny /explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect," "feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship to each other and our experience of the world.
In Mythopoetic Cinema, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli explores how contemporary European filmmakers treat... more In Mythopoetic Cinema, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli explores how contemporary European filmmakers treat mythopoetics as a critical practice that questions the constant need to provide new identities, a new Europe, and with it a new European cinema after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mythopoetic cinema questions the perpetual branding of movements, ideas, and individuals. Examining the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Sokurov, Marina Abramović, and Theodoros Angelopoulos, Ravetto-Biagioli argues that these disparate artists provide a critical reflection on what constitutes Europe in the age of neoliberalism. Their films reflect not only the violence of recent years but also help question dominant models of nation building that result in the general failure to respond ethically to rising ethnocentrism.
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evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The
digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà
vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny
refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms,
feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions,
and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our
behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds
another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our
responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's
subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present
objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet
effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses
is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software
that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could
say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick
that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated
digital technologies. /Digital Uncanny /explores how digital
technologies, particularly software systems working through massive
amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud
tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to
their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and
experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs,
Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the
digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect,"
"feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our
relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship
to each other and our experience of the world.