Francesco Careri: Walkscapes: El andar como práctica estética / Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002) [Spanish/English]

Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the “negotiated” space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.

With an Introduction by Gilles Tiberghien
English translation: Steve Piccolo, Paul Hammond
Publisher Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2002
Land&Scape series
ISBN 8425218411
205 pages

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Julia Kursell (ed.): Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930) (2008) [English, German]

The following collection of papers documents the workshop Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800 to 1930, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in October 2006.

The workshop asked about the role sound plays in the configurations among science, technology and the arts, focusing on the years between 1800 and 1930. The chronological point of departure was the appearance of a registration technique: in 1802 Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni published his book on acoustics where he extensively described the Klangfiguren – his visualizations of the movements of a vibrating, sounding body. This time span was also characterized by the systematization of research into hearing, which Hermann von Helmholtz greatly promoted through his book On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, which first appeared in 1863. Helmholtz’s resonance theory of hearing described in this book was not replaced by a new explanation for the process of hearing until the end of the 1920s, which gives another temporal delineation for the workshop. Furthermore, between 1800 and 1930 a wealth of technical innovation in the realm of acoustical media occurred: in addition to a series of visualization techniques for sound, the phonograph and gramophone, microphone and loudspeaker, telephone and radio were invented. As well, the music of European tonal composition underwent a radical change during this time that led to a collapse of the tonal system and provoked the demand for music composed of sounds and noises, rather than tones.

Conference participants were invited to discuss the role of sounds in the laboratory from different angles, in three parts. The “Materiality of Sound” was oriented towards research into material cultures and cultural techniques in experimentation. “Registration, Transmission, Transformation” put questions of medial historiography into the foreground, while “Experimental Aesthetics” thematized aesthetic implications.

With papers by Bernhard Siegert, Peter Szendy, Julia Kursell, Florian Hoelscher, Florian Dombois, Henning Schmidgen, Jonathan Sterne, Wolfgang Hagen, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Gethmann, Elena Ungeheuer, Myles W. Jackson

Publisher Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science
Preprint 346
134 pages

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Esther Leslie: Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005)

Synthetic Worlds considers the remarkable alliance between chemistry and art, taking us from the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War. Esther Leslie offers fascinating new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic, the inorganic and the synthesized in this poetics of science.

Through its dazzling innovations, which began in the nineteenth century, chemistry has granted new colours and surfaces, new substances, coatings and textures to the world. Often they are the result of accidents or the by-products of pollution. Chemistry has also invented simulants and surrogates for naturally occurring materials. Sometimes these developments confounded earlier alchemical and Romantic philosophies of science and nature, but, at other times, dynamic theories of chemical action combined with the emergent chemistry textbook orthodoxy. For example, the colour wheels of Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge, Hegelian theories of a spirit that inhabits dyes and ‘drives’ materials, and Romantic ideas of the weddings of substances influenced the experiments that boosted the successful German chemical industry after the 1840s. In turn, chemistry’s discoveries seeped back into philosophy and art.

Esther Leslie’s Synthetic Worlds considers this and other startling affinities between chemistry, industry, aesthetics and art. Themes include the impact of artificial imitations and synthetics, the location of value, the mutability of substance, chemical fragility and artistic technique, the poetics of the inorganic and pollution, Bauhaus-influenced modulation and patina in art practice, and nationalist narratives of chemical breakthrough.

Publisher Reaktion Books, 2005
Art, Industry and Industrial Studies series
ISBN 1861892489, 9781861892485
280 pages

review (Sophia Efstathiou, Hyle)

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Continent. journal, No. 2.4 (2013)

Continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, politics and art.

Continent. exists as a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media studies, art, film and philosophical thought.

Contributors to this issue: Alexander R. Galloway, Peter Burleigh, Isaac Linder, Nico Jenkins, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, A. Staley Groves, Eileen A. Joy, Bernhard Garnicnig, Paul Thomas and Tim Morton

Edited by Paul Boshears, Jamie Allen, Nico Jenkins
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN 2159-9920

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Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny, 1-9 (2007-2010) [Czech]

Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny je periodikum zaměřující se na současné vizuální umění v širším kulturním a teoretickém kontextu. Cílem Sešitu je kultivovat domácí reflexi umění tištěním odborných textů z oblasti humanitních a společenských věd, které tematizují současnou situaci umění a živé kultury u nás i v zahraničí. Sešit z principu není metodologicky vymezen; rozhodujícími měřítky jsou kvalita, podnětnost a relevance pro reflexi současného vizuálního umění.

Edited by Václav Magid
Editorial board: Claire Bishop, Claudia Joles, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Jiří Ševčík, Martin Škabraha
ISSN 1802-8918

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Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011)

What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2011
African Expressive Cultures Series
ISBN 0253356792, 9780253356796
230 pages

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Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages

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