Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 4: From Sign to Signal (2012)

“Since the 1990s there has been intensified focus on the concepts of performativity, the relational, and affect in the humanities. Scholars from different fields have in a variety of ways embraced these notions in their accounts of contemporary culture, and as such they also form the backdrop of this thematic collection of articles entitled From Sign to Signal. It seems, however, as if today’s media situation–the globally evident usage of media technologies–requires a new theoretical approach in order to deal with the intersections of technology and aesthetics, since in these cases the sign often falls short. It has therefore been the ambition of this collection to invite scholars within the humanities to take part in a discussion on the implications of a gradual shift from a (linguistically framed) paradigm of the sign to a new paradigm connected with media augmented environments.

As the term for this new paradigm we have chosen the ‘signaletic material’, coined by Gilles Deleuze in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze developed this notion in order to stress that film in his view of contemporary or modern cinema had altogether eliminated classical (literary) thoughts of plot and narration. Toward the end of Cinema 2 it becomes clear that the notion of the ‘signaletic material’ might be developed to cover all kinds of filmic and electronic material as well as the emerging new media technologies.” (from Foreword)

Edited by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, John Sundholm and Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen
Publisher Co-Action Publishing, Järfälla, Sweden, 2012
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License
eISSN 2000-4214
134 pages

HTML, PDFs (updated on 2017-10-27)
single PDF