Suchergebnisse

This essay traces the advances in time axis manipulation brought about by the media switches from symbolic mediation (alphabet) to analogue recording (phonography and cinematography) and digital processing (computers). Special emphasis is on the mathematical dimension of the final stage. The Fourier transform enables the conversion of sound events into periodicities with numerical values that can then be manipulated and converted back into sound events, even if there was no original source involved. The media access frequencies and operate at speeds beyond all human thresholds. Kittler argues that the resulting ability to subvert and simulate human perception is the very definition of technical media.

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in semantic chains on their mutual indifference. Glitches are symbols whose nonhuman labor reveals the limits of humanism.

This article studies the Picasso in Palestine exhibit in light of what it means to be a modern and resistant Palestinian colonial subject, living in a sovereign state-to-be in our contemporary global world. By drawing on theories of the imagination, resistance studies, art, and internal relations, as well as discourse analysis of the content of the project, field interview material, and published critiques of the project, the article queries the conceptual boundaries of studying the Picasso in Palestine project. The article contextualizes a moment in Palestine's history of visual cultural production within wider debates and scholarship on the construction of resistant praxis in cultural production; the distribution of power; culture and representation; and image circulation, translation, and reception in a colonial setting, global context, and transnational frame. Tracing the readings of the project across transnational space by locating them within the discourses they engaged with in both the "global" arts circuit as well as the "local" cultural scene, the article rethinks transnational processes of arts production emergent from and focused on Palestine, the different forms that resistance in cultural practices take and how they acquire different meanings in the process of travel.

Photographer Terry Richardson works in a digital aesthetic vernacular that looks more to underground hard-core pornography of yesteryear than traditions associated with the institutionalization of erotica, as associated with Playboy. And yet his images, in Kibosh and Terryworld, anticipate the contemporary public recalibration of ideas of intimacy as associated with social media, tally with contested ideas of the sexualization of female empowerment as associated with contested elements of third wave feminism, and can be read as a contemporary phase of Antonio Negri's theory of art and immaterial labor in their evidencing of the affective labor on the part of the photographer himself. This critical commentary, the first such academic writing on Richardson, explores his work in these contexts and considers Richardson's return to the figure (over abstraction) as evidencing and exploring of the nature of work, and the nascent eroticization of working relations, under Western neoliberal regimes.