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Abstract
This article explores the idea of "materiality" as it relates to contemporary experimental moving image practice. It argues that rather than effacing the role of materiality, the digitization of the moving image has heightened and complexified its ability to function as an engine of affect. Here, the idea of "material" is considered a specter that constantly returns to reinvent itself within the liquid domain of the digital. To illustrate these points, I will draw off a range of example artworks featured in the recent internationally focused curatorial project Re:Cinema. These works simultaneously engage the traditions and strategies of experimental art practice (flicker film, structuralist film, montage, experimental video) and popular culture (television, music video, vernacular video) to reassert the material underpinnings of the image itself.

Contents -- 1. Materiality in Practice: An Introduction - Ruth M. Van Dyke -- 2. Talk to It: Memory and Material Agency in the Arab Alawite (Nusayri) Community - Sule Can -- 3. Replicating Things, Replicating Identity: The Movement of Chacoan Ritual Paraphernalia Beyond the Chaco World - Erina Gruner -- 4. Animacy of the Everyday: Materiality, Bundling, and the Production of Quotidian Ceramics - Tanya Chiykowski -- 5. An Empire of Clay: Ceramics and Discipline in the Early Modern Portuguese Empire - Rui Gomes Coelho

This book examines the relationships between society and material culture: the interaction between people and things. Tim Dant argues that the traditional approach to material culture has focused on the symbolic meanings of objects, largely overlooking the material impact that objects have on everyday life in late modernity. Dant resists the now well-established model of consumption as the principal relationship with `things'' in our lives. Using the motor car as a recurring theme, he shows how we confront our society through material interaction with the objects that surround us. Materiality

This article focuses on a case of failed consecration: the Egyptian obelisk in New York's Central Park, commonly known as Cleopatra's Needle. The obelisk arrived in New York from Alexandria in 1880, with great fanfare. For a brief period, it was the talk of the town: a tourist curiosity and star of advertising campaigns for consumer goods. After an initial surge in public visibility, the monument's prominence faded. Today, the obelisk is not on the list of New York's top cultural attractions, and no longer features in media campaigns or political rallies. I ask why the obelisk's initial popularity failed to crystallize into an enduring condition of consecration. To answer this question, I use archival data to chart the obelisk's transfer of ownership and planned move, through its Central Park début and subsequent decline in cultural salience. The obelisk met key criteria associated with successful cases of retrospective consecration. What weakened the obelisk's career were lack of consecrating institutions and inherently unstable material conditions. These mechanisms are symbiotically related: because no institution took responsibility for conserving and protecting the obelisk, its granite face rapidly deteriorated and frustrated attempts to attract potential consecrating institutions. The article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on retrospective consecration. First, by discussing a failed case, it highlights the linked efficacy of consecration formation mechanisms. Second, in focusing on an ancient monument, it demonstrates the role played by materials and the specific measures of consecration that obtain in the broader sphere of ancient monuments.