Laurence A. Rickels: Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, documentary film, film, film criticism, photography
Since 1974, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a substantial body of films that explore a world of difference defined by the tension and transfer between settled and nomadic ways of life. In many of her films, including Exile Shanghai, an experimental documentary about the Jews of Shanghai, and Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in which passengers on the Trans-Siberian Express are abducted by Mongolian bandits, she also probes the encounter with the other, whether exotic or simply unpredictable.
In Ulrike Ottinger Laurence A. Rickels offers a series of sensitive and original analyses of Ottinger’s films, as well as her more recent photographic artworks, situated within a dazzling thought experiment centered on the history of art cinema through the turn of the twenty-first century. In addition to commemorating the death of a once-vital art form, this book also affirms Ottinger’s defiantly optimistic turn toward the documentary film as a means of mediating present clashes between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global.
Widely regarded as a singular and provocative talent, Ottinger’s conspicuous absence from critical discourse is, for Rickels, symptomatic of the art cinema’s demise. Incorporating interviews he conducted with Ottinger and illustrated with stunning examples from her photographic oeuvre, this book takes up the challenges posed by Ottinger’s filmography to interrogate, ultimately, the very practice—and possibility—of art cinema today.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816653305, 9780816653300
288 pages
Florian Hecker: Chimerization (2012) [EN, DE, Farsi, AAC, MP3]
Filed under booklet, sound recording | Tags: · acoustics, hearing, photography, psychoacoustics, sound
Chimerization investigates human relationship to sound, spatial hearing, and psychoacoustics through processed photography created by Florian Hecker to dramatize the psychoacoustic phenomenon of the auditory chimaera. The term auditory chimaera metaphorically employs the notion of the chimaera from Greek mythology, a hybrid creature whom, according to Homer, was “of divine race, not of men, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the middle a goat, breathing forth in terrible manner the force of blazing fire” (Iliad,6.181).
Originally developed at MIT by Bertrand Delgutte, Senior Research Scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, the concept of the Auditory Chimaeras allows one to explore the relation between pitch perception and sound localization as they reveal a possible acoustic basis for the hypothesized ‘what’ and ‘where’ pathways in the auditory cortex. The concept of Chimerization takes a fresh and novel approach on the mapping and transferring of sonic qualities between different sound sources. While sound morphing has a tradition within the field of electroacoustic music, this rigorous scientific approach–the mapping and exchange of the phenomenal features of different sounds–opens the ‘phenomenological gap’ within the field of psychoacoustics while providing an intense experiential notion.
With an introduction by Chus Martínez
Publisher documenta und Museum Fridericianum, Kassel
Series: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken No. 102
ISBN 3927015512
26 pages
review (Grayson Currin, Pitchfork)
project page
upcoming book with extended material
PDF
ZIP (PDF+AAC)
ZIP (PDF+MP3)
related: Florian Hecker: Speculative Solution (2011/2012)
Tanja Ostojić: Strategies of Success / Curators Series, 2001-2003 (2004) [English/Serbian/French]
Filed under book | Tags: · art, immigration, institutional critique, performance art, photography, power, women
“Tanja Ostojić is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgrade who lives and works in Berlin. In her provocative performances, she investigates the position of women within contemporary cultural and political power regimes. She uses persiflage, provocation and irony as strategies to expose and subvert the exclusionary mechanisms of European immigration policies and the hierarchies within the Western art world.
In the years 2001 to 2003, Tanja Ostojić worked on the series Strategies of Success / Curator Series, which consists of performances, installations, photographs and a journal. In I’ll Be Your Angel (2001) she accompanied the curator Harald Szeemann during the opening of the 49th Venice Biennale, never leaving his side. She “presented” her conceptual body art work Black Square on White (2001), in which her pubic hair was trimmed in a square, by keeping it hidden. Tanja Ostojić’s other public actions include taking a bubble bath with the Italian curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and art critic Ludovico Pratesi in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome as the lovely ending to a shared gala dinner, and washing the feet of the Belgrade-based curator Stevan Vuković in Sofa for Curator (2002). The only traces of the non-public performance with the Albanian curator Edi Muka, Vacation with Curator (2003), are the photographs taken by the paparazzi she hired. In her work Politics of queer curatorial positions: After Rosa von Praunheim, Fassbinder and Bridge Markland (2003) she and the Slovenian curator and theorist Marina Gržinić re-enact an iconographic scene featuring Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress to King Henry IV of France, and one of her sisters.” source
With texts by Marina Gržinić, Suzana Milevska, Tanja Ostojić.
Publisher Galérie La Box, Paris, with Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, 2004
Translations by Laurence Chamlou, Danielle Charonnet, Dušan Djordjević Mileusnić
ISBN 2910164322, 9782910164324
144 pages
PDF (b/w; no OCR)
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