John Berger: Ways of Seeing (1972)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, art criticism, art history, popular culture, visual culture

Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.
The book Ways of Seeing was made by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings. Ways of Seeing is considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history.
First published in the UK by the BBC and Penguin Books, 1972
Publisher Penguin Books, 1977
165 pages
Everything Magazine (1992-2001)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · aesthetics, art, art criticism, contemporary art, internet art, london, media culture, music, net art, new media, philosophy, technology, theory

The magazine reported on London’s independent art scene, projects, politics and philosophy throughout the 1990s. The web archive includes essays, interviews, reviews, web projects, and two eBC net casts.
Editorial collective (e/E): Luci Eyers, Steve Rushton aka Martina Kapopkin, John Timberlake
Published in London
via Steve Rushton
Interview with editors (Real Audio, 1999)
HTML (Issue -1)
HTML (partial archive, use menu at the bottom)
Net casts (1998)
Sher Doruff: The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram (2006)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · aesthetics, art, collaboration, composition, digital art, emergence, media art, network art, performance, software, translocal performance
This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram – an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for real-time, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.
Doctor of Philosophy, SMARTlab Programme in Performative New Media Arts, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London
288 pages
PDF
PDF (Appendix “The KeyWorx Interviews: Transcripts of Interviews and Conversations with KeyWorx Artists”)