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May 31, 2012
in jean baudrillard why hasn't everything already disappeared? photography virtual reality digital photography image reality quote
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“this puts an end even to the imagining of the image, to its fundamental illusion since, in a computer generation, the referent exists and there is no place even for the real to ‘take place,’ being immediately produced as virtual reality…All this leads inevitably to the death of photography as an original medium. With the analogue image it is the essence of photography that disappears. That image still attested to the presence of subject to an object…

The problem of reference images was already an absolute one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the virtual, the referent disappears, when there is no situation of a real world set over a light-sensitive film…then there is, ultimately, no possible representation anymore.”

one last Baudrillard post for the time being

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May 31, 2012
in why hasn't everything already disappeared? jean baudrillard baudrillard quote real
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“Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?”

“the great disappearance is not, then, simply that of the virtual transmutation of things…but that of the division of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality…it merges with the course of things and, as a result, becomes superfluous…it is for the same reason—because it became increasingly merged with objective banality—that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous

…Is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?”

May 31, 2012
in quote language meaning photography gpoy baudrillard ean baudrillard jean baudrillard why hasn't everything already disappeared?
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“There is great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. To do so is to make objects strike a pose. And things themselves begin to pose in the light of meaning as soon as they feel a subject’s gaze upon them.

[…]

The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seen language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning—this is what fascinates us…The Vanishing Point of Language.

May not photography also be said to function as…the Vanishing Point of the Picture[?]”

sitting in the library with a stack of books as Baudrillard explains things in the words I could not find.

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May 25, 2012
in future of the book quote reading book physicality words language
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say what? You wonder with the depth of contextualization of reading within cognitive science and literary and media theory why there is not equivalent contextualization of the physicality of books. The physical world of nature has deep context in science and theory so why are physical books innocuous? And an additional question is could contextualization of literary content and the physicality of books be related. Is the high abstraction of the “word” enabled by a physicality of its presence to the senses? Or does abstraction take on a life of its own displacing the consequence of physicality? And if so, can physicality still have something to teach at the far reaches of screen simulation? (via futureofthebook.com » Blog Archive)

say what?

You wonder with the depth of contextualization of reading within cognitive science and literary and media theory why there is not equivalent contextualization of the physicality of books. The physical world of nature has deep context in science and theory so why are physical books innocuous? And an additional question is could contextualization of literary content and the physicality of books be related. Is the high abstraction of the “word” enabled by a physicality of its presence to the senses? Or does abstraction take on a life of its own displacing the consequence of physicality? And if so, can physicality still have something to teach at the far reaches of screen simulation?

(via futureofthebook.com » Blog Archive)

May 18, 2012
in quote photography theory time space interdisciplinarity nontemporal things jan baetens language
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the temporality of all nontemporal things

“By turning away the essential opposition between the temporality of the text and the spatiality of the image, the interdisciplinary reading of photography has created an internal subdivision between two types of pictures: on the one hand, pictures capable of being read within a temporal (or even narrative and fictional) prospective, and on the other hand, pictures where this temporal dimension is simply not relevant. And although the frontiers between both categories are always shifting, the mere acceptance of this difference is hazardous, since it sneakily reintroduces a kind of essential difference between time and space that the interdisciplinary approach of photography should question more radically.”

n o n t e m p o r a l   t h i n g s ,  t e m p o r a l l y

things I’m trying to say-

“Each new occurence of interdisciplinary research crudely reveals the limits of all other language. and of course taking into account the image itself as a thought- and knowledge-producing device can only intensify our attention towards everything that escapes or exceeds verbal language. Visual thinking is not only the lesson one can draw from the contact of words and images in photographic research. Why not turn the argument around and observe that whatever the obstacles may be, images do manage to say something, whereas words do not necessarily fail to do the same?…The very fact that the interdisciplinary intermingling of words and images in our discourses on photography only seems to enhance our faith in the impossibility of representation may be seen as a paradoxical invitation to go beyond this difficulty and to search for clarity…Why not consider our new commitment to interdisciplinarity and the new relationships between words and images an attempt to speak nevertheless?”

from Conceptual Limitations of Our Reflection on Photography: the Question of “Interdisciplinarity”—Jan Baetens

(Source: amazon.com)

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May 17, 2012
in umberto eco interview lists spiegel culture quote
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SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco:

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

[…]

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

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May 17, 2012
in sentences language communication quote william gass The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence
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Lined & Unlined: The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

linedandunlined:

A stunning bit of writing from William Gass, by way of his essay “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence” from his collection Life Sentences:

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see the sentence, but to sound it, because it is now a small mouthful. These sounds are not those of ordinary speech, but the spectral mimicry of things said to the mind, heard only by the mind, in the arena of the mind — in the subvocal consciousness that exists during reading.

The saleman’s sentence seems quite sure of itself. It is direct; it is definite; it has no room for reservations. Yet without altering a word, its epistemological and ontological status can be radically altered. That is why I called these verbal instruments, transformative operators. For instances, we could lower the sentence’s degree of assurance. “[I thought that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” “[I guessed that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but Gertrude was of quite a different opinion].” Amphibolously: “[Harold said that if] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [he was a monkey’s uncle].” Or change tone and attitude: “[I certainly hoped] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [otherwise I’ve just now bought a cat’s brush to comb my beard].” “The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but what if he were also the exhibitionist who has been frightening the neighborhood?]” More radically, we can put it in another realm of Being. “[While seated before the fire in my dressing gown reading Descartes’sMeditations, I dreamed I heard a knocking. Then a cuckoo popped out of its clockhouse to announce that] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman. [I realized, when I was awakened by my desire to answer his knocking, that I had been dreaming inside a dream not altogether mine.]”

Layers of reality, degrees of uncertainty, ranges of attitude, levels of society, depth of contextual connection, modulations of tone, the ramifications and complexities of concept, and, above all, the vocabulary of the denoted world, must be taken into account, managed, and made the best of.”


(via linedandunlined)
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May 12, 2012
in marina abramovic performance performance art hyperallergic article quote link art
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hyperallergic: The End of Performance Art as We Know It Marina Abramović wearing the model for her eponymous Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (all images courtesy OMA) “To me, when you die, you can’t leave anything physical — it doesn’t make any sense; but an idea can last for a long time,” she said. The embodiment of the idea, she explained, is the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, which will function as a museum, archive, school and theater, and also as her legacy — all of which sound quite physical. The institute will cover all different types of performing arts, including theater, dance, performance, music and video art, and not surprisingly, it will focus on Abramović’s MO: long-duration artworks, projects that could last anywhere from six hours to 365 days. “In the 40 years of my career, I’ve learn that only long-durational works of art have the potential change the viewer and the performer,” Abramović said. “Our life is more and more busy, so our art should be longer.” But the institute isn’t just for performance artists; Abramović wants to teach the public how to see and appreciate durational work. Visitors will be schooled in the Abramović Method, which blurs the line between audience and artist by turning spectators into performers themselves. Upon arriving at the institute, visitors will don white lab coats, check their belongings, sign a contract — “Give me your word of honor that you’ll spend two and a half hours in the exhibit,” is how Abramović explained the current version, at an exhibition at PAC in Milan — and then move through the different experiences and rooms, receiving a certificate of completion at the end. (via-Is Marina Abramović Trying to Create a Performance Art Utopia?) As practiced by Abramović and her peers (those mentioned above, along with Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta among many others), Performance was born of ideas unbound by traditional media, that could be expressed only through the human body. Taken to its logical extreme, that art would live and die with the body of the artist who made it. This is essentially the step that choreographer Merce Cunningham embraced when he planned that his company would disband two years after his death: it was a decision that understood the fatality, and the beauty, of the irretrievable moment.

hyperallergic:

The End of Performance Art as We Know It

Marina Abramović wearing the model for her eponymous Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (all images courtesy OMA)

“To me, when you die, you can’t leave anything physical — it doesn’t make any sense; but an idea can last for a long time,” she said. The embodiment of the idea, she explained, is the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, which will function as a museum, archive, school and theater, and also as her legacy — all of which sound quite physical.

The institute will cover all different types of performing arts, including theater, dance, performance, music and video art, and not surprisingly, it will focus on Abramović’s MO: long-duration artworks, projects that could last anywhere from six hours to 365 days. “In the 40 years of my career, I’ve learn that only long-durational works of art have the potential change the viewer and the performer,” Abramović said. “Our life is more and more busy, so our art should be longer.”

But the institute isn’t just for performance artists; Abramović wants to teach the public how to see and appreciate durational work. Visitors will be schooled in the Abramović Method, which blurs the line between audience and artist by turning spectators into performers themselves. Upon arriving at the institute, visitors will don white lab coats, check their belongings, sign a contract — “Give me your word of honor that you’ll spend two and a half hours in the exhibit,” is how Abramović explained the current version, at an exhibition at PAC in Milan — and then move through the different experiences and rooms, receiving a certificate of completion at the end.

(via-Is Marina Abramović Trying to Create a Performance Art Utopia?)


As practiced by Abramović and her peers (those mentioned above, along with Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta among many others), Performance was born of ideas unbound by traditional media, that could be expressed only through the human body.

Taken to its logical extreme, that art would live and die with the body of the artist who made it. This is essentially the step that choreographer Merce Cunningham embraced when he planned that his company would disband two years after his death: it was a decision that understood the fatality, and the beauty, of the irretrievable moment.


(via hyperallergic)
40 notes

May 6, 2012
in quote photography theory anne mccauley
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Neither // Nor: it’s so simple. i know we all get it by now, but i’m writing my last...

neithernor:

it’s so simple. i know we all get it by now, but i’m writing my last required paper ever and it’s so refreshing to stumble upon this text again:

“A photograph does not have to be a multiple, it does not have to be on paper, it does not have to be flat, it does not have to be made with a camera, it does not inherently have to be fixed or permanent (although that is nice if you want anyone else to ever see it), it does not have to be iconic (or “resemble” the image formed by the projection of light through a lens onto the retina): it has to be generated by light.”

- from Anne McCauley’s essay the Trouble with Photography

just tryna be clear here for a second

“Rather than trying to prove that “a photograph is x” or “a photograph reveals y” because of the way it is made or its relationship to its referent, one might more productively consider the photograph as an idea as much as a thing, in which repressed human concerns about making, keeping and losing, resurface.”


This, too.


(via neithernor)
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May 1, 2012
in photo photography quote dlk
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"Trying to pin down an exacting definition of “contemporary photography”, an ultimate list of what’s in and what’s out, has proven to be an elusive, frustrating, and perhaps even delusional, pastime. Do we distinguish between or eliminate camera-less images, photograms, darkroom effects, collage, montage, and rephotography/appropriation? Or do we just include anything and everything that has its output as a photographic print, regardless of the intermediate processes used to make it? Where are the edges and bright lines? These kinds of questions and debates have become even more puzzling with the increasingly broad use of digital technology and the advent of countless new printing processes. The boundaries of our photographic playing field are getting murkier every day."

~ DLK COLLECTION: Photography Is @Higher Pictures (via photographsonthebrain)

(via photographsonthebrain)
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April 30, 2012
in impermanent book rhizome quote books language
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new-aesthetic: “Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.” [Jonathan Franzen] [Franzen’s] speech raised heated discussions in newspaper columns and on the internet. The focus was mainly on defending technology and e-books as a viable and improved evolution, and on how he was being retrograde.  What was missing from the discourse was the fact that technology has also violently altered printed books in a way from which there is no return. We are so disconnected from the means of production that nobody seems to be aware that books are produced very differently then they were 100 years ago. Digital files are exchanged between writers, publishers and printers all over the world. In the context of the Piracy Project, which we initiated in London in 2010, we discovered cases, which not only took control over the object, but over the content. Inspired by Daniel Alarcon’s article in Granta magazine, “Life Among Pirates”, we traveled to Peru and discovered, for instance, a pirated version of Jaime Bayly’s novel No se lo digas a nadie with two extra chapters added. This physical object may look obviously pirated to a trained eye but could easily pass as the original if you were not looking for differences. The extra chapters are good, good enough to pass undetected by readers.  Rhizome | The Impermanent Book

new-aesthetic:

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.” [Jonathan Franzen]

[Franzen’s] speech raised heated discussions in newspaper columns and on the internet. The focus was mainly on defending technology and e-books as a viable and improved evolution, and on how he was being retrograde.  What was missing from the discourse was the fact that technology has also violently altered printed books in a way from which there is no return. We are so disconnected from the means of production that nobody seems to be aware that books are produced very differently then they were 100 years ago. Digital files are exchanged between writers, publishers and printers all over the world.

In the context of the Piracy Project, which we initiated in London in 2010, we discovered cases, which not only took control over the object, but over the content. Inspired by Daniel Alarcon’s article in Granta magazine, “Life Among Pirates”, we traveled to Peru and discovered, for instance, a pirated version of Jaime Bayly’s novel No se lo digas a nadie with two extra chapters added. This physical object may look obviously pirated to a trained eye but could easily pass as the original if you were not looking for differences. The extra chapters are good, good enough to pass undetected by readers. 

Rhizome | The Impermanent Book


(via new-aesthetic)
18 notes

April 26, 2012
in photography quote reality
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"Photography is generally taken in either of two ways: as an event, but then as an odd looking one, a frozen gestalt that conveys very little, if anything at all, of the fluency of things happening in real life; or it is taken as a picture, as an autonomous representation that can indeed be framed and hung, but which then curiously ceases to refer to the particular event from which it was drawn. In other words, the photograph is seen either as natural evidence and live witness (picture) of a vanished past, or as an abrupt artifact (event), a devilish device designed to capture life but unable to convey it."

~ Thierry de Deuve - Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox
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April 24, 2012
in e-flux incomplete projects unfinished art failure quote link
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"Though the state of being unrealized implies the potential for realization, not all of the 107 projects were meant be carried out. Certain works have deliberately been left undone by the artists, although they have “failed” in very interesting ways. Other planned projects involve consciously utopian, non-utilitarian, and conceptual spaces that were not made available for realization. Whether censored, forgotten, postponed, impossible, or rejected, these unrealized projects form a unique testament to the speculative power of non-action. As Joel Fisher suggested in his essay “The Success of Failure,” “The failures of big ideas are sometimes more impressive than the successes of little ones."

~ Unbuilt Roads | e-flux
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