Richard Grusin: Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · affect, mass media, media, mediality, memory, preemption, remediation, security
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 have been called the world’s first live global media event. Responding to the immediacy and collective shock produced by live coverage of the collapse of the Twin Towers, print, televisual, and networked media have become obsessed with the pre-mediation of potential futures.
In an era of heightened securitization, US and global media have attempted to prevent a recurrence of such media trauma by ensuring that no future will be able to emerge into the present that has not already been premeditated in the past. Socially networked US and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.
Following up on the groundbreaking work of media theory Remediation: Understanding New Media, Grusin develops the logic of premediation in terms of such concepts as mediality, the affective life of media, and the anticipation of security.
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
ISBN 0230242529, 9780230242524
240 pages
review (Jussi Parikka, Leonardo)
Comment (0)Andreas Huyssen: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, berlin, buenos aires, city, history, memory, new york
Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center.
Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2003
Cultural Memory in the Present series
ISBN 0804745617, 9780804745611
192 pages
Lisa Saltzman: Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art history, contemporary art, memory
“In an ancient account of painting’s origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists’ work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2006
ISBN 0226734080, 9780226734088
133 pages
via Jo Morfin
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