Thomas Bartscherer, Roderick Coover (eds.): Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (2011)

“Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensible volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2011
ISBN 0226038319, 9780226038315
448 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-9-3)

Lizbeth Goodman, Jane de Gay (eds.): The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance (2000)

“The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides material on:
* post-coloniality and performance theory and practice
* critical theories and performance
* intercultural perspectives
* power, politics and the theatre
* sexuality in performance
* live arts and the media
* theatre games.”

Publisher Routledge, 2000
Performance Studies series
ISBN 0415174732, 9780415174732
322 pages

publisher

PDF (updated on 2016-12-23)

Erin Manning: Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Technologies of Lived Abstraction (2009)

With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.

Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson’s idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language’s affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.

Relationscapes is a radically empirical book, working directly out of examples and delving into the complexity of relations these examples suggest. It takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead’s importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. Relationscapes is truly a transdisciplinary book, not aiming to cover the ground of a particular discipline but making clear how the specificity of a particular inquiry can alter key questions that emerge in the interstices between disciplines. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 026213490X, 9780262134903
272 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2013-1-29)