Lisa Parks: Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · archaeology, art, body, journalism, mass media, satellite, space, technology, television, vision
“In 1957 Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, dazzled people as it zipped around the planet. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than eight thousand satellites orbited the Earth, and satellite practices such as live transmission, direct broadcasting, remote sensing, and astronomical observation had altered how we imagined ourselves in relation to others and our planet within the cosmos. In Cultures in Orbit, Lisa Parks analyzes these satellite practices and shows how they have affected meanings of “the global” and “the televisual.” Parks suggests that the convergence of broadcast, satellite, and computer technologies necessitates an expanded definition of “television,” one that encompasses practices of military monitoring and scientific observation as well as commercial entertainment and public broadcasting.
Roaming across the disciplines of media studies, geography, and science and technology studies, Parks examines uses of satellites by broadcasters, military officials, archaeologists, and astronomers. She looks at Our World, a live intercontinental television program that reached five hundred million viewers in 1967, and Imparja tv, an Aboriginal satellite TV network in Australia. Turning to satellites’ remote-sensing capabilities, she explores the U.S. military’s production of satellite images of the war in Bosnia as well as archaeologists’ use of satellites in the excavation of Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria, Egypt. Parks’s reflections on how Western fantasies of control are implicated in the Hubble telescope’s views of outer space point to a broader concern: that while satellite uses promise a “global village,” they also cut and divide the planet in ways that extend the hegemony of the post-industrial West. In focusing on such contradictions, Parks highlights how satellites cross paths with cultural politics and social struggles.”
Publisher Duke University Press, 2005
ISBN 0822334615, 9780822334613
256 pages
Review (John Cloud, Technology and Culture, 2006)
Review (Howard Fremeth, Topia, 2006)
Review (Gerald Sim, Screening the Past, 2006)
Review (Fredessa D. Hamilton, The Communication Review, 2007)
Notes from Lisa Parks’ 2008 talk on satellite art (Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art)
Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, archaeology, art, art history, avant-garde, ethnography, film, painting, photography, sculpture, surrealism
“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”
With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.
Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages
Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
Wikipedia
PDF (104 MB, updated on 2020-2-20)
Comments (6)Denise Schmandt-Besserat: When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · antiquity, archaeology, art, art history, history, mesopotamia, middle east, painting, writing
“Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC—the world’s oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the “100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science.”
In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 3500 and 3000 BC the conventions of writing—everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs—spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art’s reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.
Schmandt-Besserat’s pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art documents a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.”
Publisher University of Texas Press, 2007
ISBN 0292713347, 9780292713345
134 pages