Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice (2012-)

Sensate is a peer-reviewed, issueless, open-access, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Its mission is to provide a scholarly and artistic forum for experiments in critical media practices that expand academic discourse by taking us beyond the margins of the printed page. Fundamental to this expansion is a re-imagining of what constitutes a work of scholarship or art.

Editors-in-Chief: Lindsey Lodhie, Peter McMurray, Joana Pimenta, and Elizabeth Watkins
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license

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Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989-) [English, Spanish]

Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.

The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.

Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.

Publisher MIT Press, 1989
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Series
ISBN 0262022680
493 pages

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review (Beste Alpay, The Montréal Review)
Susan Buck-Morss at Monoskop wiki (incl. source bibliography)

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (English, updated on 2013-5-2)
Dialectica de la mirada: Walter Benjamin y el proyecto de los Pasajes (Spanish, trans. Nora Rabotnikof, 1995, updated on 2013-5-2)
Download Benjamin’s Arcade Project (German, English)

Aleksander Maciesza: Historia fotografii polskiej w latach 1839–1889 (1972) [Polish]

“W roku 1939 miala być obchodzona uroczyscie setna rocznica fotografii. Towarzysztwo Naukowe Płockie zamierzalo jubileusz ten uczcić opracowaniem i wydaniem pionierskego dzieła pt.: Dzieje fotografii w Polsce. Materiały gromadził i dzieło od szeregu lat opracowywał dr Aleksander Maciesza (1875–1945) – prezes Towarzysztwo Naukowego Płockiego w latach 1907–1945, sam fotografik i znakomity znawca przedmiotu.

Niestety, na przeszkodzie stanął wybuch drugiej wojny światovej. Autor zdążył opracować pierwsze pięćdziesięciolecie (1839–1889). Ale nawet ta niedokończona praca, będąca jednak pierwszym, obszerniejszym przedstawieniem dziejów fotografii w Polsce, zasługuje na wydanie tak ze względu na zawarte w niej materiały, jak i na światło, które rzuca na rozwój kultury polskiej, ściśle związanej najpierw z rozwojem druku, a potem fotografii i pochodzących od niej kina i telewizji.

Kierując się tymi względami, Zarząd Towarzysztwa Naukowego Płockiego zdecydował się wydać prace prezesa Aleksandra Macieszy w tej postaci w jakiej – ze wględów technicznych i innych jest to możliwe, mając na uwadze, że znajdą się autorzy, którzy rozpoczętą historię fotografii polskiej doprowadza do czasów najnowszych.” (from the Introduction)

Publisher Towarzystwo Naukowe Płockie, Plock, 1972
83 pages

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Brian Clegg: Light Years: An Exploration of Mankind’s Enduring Fascination with Light (2001)

This is the story of the greatest puzzle in our universe: what is light? Light Years is an engaging survey of everything we know of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomenon and the remarkable people who have been captivated by it. Light Years looks over the shoulders of the great revolutionaries of light theory–Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Feynman–and traces the evolution of light-driven devices from the camera to the laser.

Publisher John Wiley & Sons, 2001
ISBN 0471211826
310 pages

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Vilém Flusser: Zwiegespräche: Interviews 1967-1991 (1996) [German]

Vilém Flusser war ein hinreißender Redner und enthusiastischer Gesprächspartner. Eine Sammlung seiner Interviews gewährt insofern einen trefflichen Einblick in sein verzweigtes philosophisches Denken – ein Denken, das über den in den 80er Jahren vorherrschend gewesenen Medien- und Kommunikationsansatz weit hinausreicht und Vilém Flusser als universalen Kritiker unserer Kultur vorstellt.

Editor Klaus Sander
Publisher European Photography, Göttingen, 1996
Volume 9 of Edition Flusser
ISBN 3923283385, 9783923283385
255 pages

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Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig (eds.): CAS: What is it? (2013) [English/Czech]

Publication documents the activities of the Center for Audio Visual Studies (CAS) at FAMU in Prague, founded in 2005. Featuring 30 works by the CAS students and alumni as well as texts by the teachers Helena Bendová, Martin Blažíček, Miroslav Petříček, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig and Miloš Vojtěchovský

Publikace CAS: Co to je? není výstavním katalogem ani sborníkem z odborné konference. Pohybuje se někde mezi, podobně jako je mezioborové studium v Centru audiovizuálních studií FAMU. Jádrem publikace jsou dokumentace různorodých projektů dnes už třicítky studentů či absolventů CAS, ale i práce jejich učitelů. Do knihy například přispěl filozof Miroslav Petříček, ale je tu i dystopická sci-fi povídka. Najdeme tu analýzu studentských filmů od filmové historičky Heleny Bendové, ale i dokumentace a anotace samotných děl. Ty se pohybují na široké škále od dokumentárních filmů, interaktivních instalací, on-line projektů, živých performancí po street artové intervence do veřejného prostoru. Z pedagogů CAS do knihy dále přispěli Martin Blažíček, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig a Miloš Vojtěchovský.

Publisher Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, 2013
ISBN 9788073312657
332 pages

book launch (Prague, 16 April 2013)
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Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse (eds.): Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (2012)

Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are actively exploring and creatively responding to the geologic depth of “now.” Contributors’ ideas and works are drawn from architecture, design, contemporary philosophy and art. They are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable or possible if humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences.

Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. As a condition of contemporary life in 2012, the geologic “now” is lived as a cascade of events. Humans and what we build participate in their unfolding. Today, and unlike the environmental movements of the 1970s, the geologic counts as “the environment” and invites us to extend our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core.

A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the “geologic turn” that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices.

Publisher Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York, December 2012
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9780615766362
262 pages

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