David Campany: Photography and Cinema (2008)

What did the arrival of cinema do for photography? How did the moving image change our relation to the still image? Why have cinema and photography been so drawn to each other? Close-ups, freeze frames and the countless portrayals of photographers on screen are signs of cinema’s enduring attraction to the still image. Photo-stories, sequences and staged tableaux speak of the deep influence of cinema on photography.

Photography and Cinema a considers the importance of the still image for filmmakers such as the Lumière brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Mark Lewis, Agnès Varda, Peter Weir, Christopher Nolan and many others. In parallel it looks at the cinematic in the work of photographers and artists that include Germaine Krull, William Klein, John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman.

From film stills and flipbooks to slide shows and digital imaging, hybrid visual forms have established an ambiguous realm between motion and stillness. David Campany assembles a missing history in which photography and cinema have been each other’s muse and inspiration for over a century.

Publisher Reaktion Books, 2008
Exposures (London)
ISBN 1861893515, 9781861893512
160 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Anthony Dunne: Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (1999/2005)

“As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from ‘intelligent’ toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the ‘electrosphere’ in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.

The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, ‘mixing criticism with optimism.’ Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include ‘Electroclimates,’ animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; ‘When Objects Dream…,’ consumer products that “dream” in electromagnetic waves; ‘Thief of Affection,’ which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; ‘Tuneable Cities,’ which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the ‘Faraday Chair: Negative Radio,’ enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield.

Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: ‘Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable.’ His project and proposals challenge it to do so.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262042320, 9780262042321
174 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-19)

Agnieszka Pokrywka: New Media Art in Central and Eastern Europe in the 2000s (2009) [Polish]

The thesis is a presentation and analysis of contemporary new media art in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of history (soviet times) and current situation (network society). First chapter of this work is focused on the issues mentioned above, simultaneously being kind of theoretical introduction to the concepts of Central and Eastern Europe, network society or new media art which are closely related to the technological revolution. Second chapter is kind of fusion between mentioned above subjects which apparently seem to be very different and discordant but in fact they’re deeply connected and dependent. Analysis of them allow us to understand correctly and truly realities of new media art origins in Central Eastern Europe. Comprehending of these terms became to be a necessary base for analysis technologically based art in the context of European (Chapter Three) and global (Chapter Four) networks of media creativity. Speaking generally, what has been discussed theoretically in the first part of this work is supplemented by specific examples in the second half which is showing different networks focused on organization, theory, practice of technological art. Complex and variable networks of new media art centers were visualized as a CEEMAC2000+ map (Appendix 3). The main aim of this thesis is to underline historical, political and economical influence on new media art development in Central Eastern Europe.

Master of Arts thesis
Dept of Art Criticism and Promotion, Poznan Academy of Fine Arts, 2009
Supervisor: Professor Grzegorz Dziamski
Length: 111 pages
Published under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Poland

Accompanying material
Map

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