Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (eds.): Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011)

“It has become a commonplace that “images” were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? Releasing the Image understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze’s post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne’s painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.”

With contributions by Peter Geimer, Jean-Luc Marion, Giorgio Agamben, Mark B.N. Hansen, Vivian Sobchack, Timothy Murray, Cesare Casarino, Kenneth Surin, Forest Pyle, Kevin McLaughlin, Bernard Stiegler

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0804761388, 9780804761383
304 pages

Publisher

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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory, No 1-5 (1997-2011)

Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #5 (2007-11)
Neurobiopolitics, Pluripotentiality and Cognitive Capitalism, a work in progress…
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #4 (2005-07)
Conference of Neuroaesthetics
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #3 (2003-04)
Buildings, Movies and Brains.
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #2 (2000-02)
Cinema and the Brain
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #1 (1997-99)
Introduction to Neuro-Aesthetic Theory
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Contributors: Warren Neidich, Charles T. Wolfe, Andrew Patrizio, Philippe Rahm, Meena Alexander, Michael Madore, Martina Wicklein, Martina Siebert, Norman M. Klein, Michael Salcman, Nicholas Wade, Nicholas Chase, Nathalie Angles, Martha Trivizas, Nicola Diamond, Mark Cohen, Lev Manovich, Laura U. Marks, Lucy Steeds, Mark Bishop, Olafur Eliasson, Margarita Gluzberg, Marcos Novak, M. A. Greenstein, Marquard Smith, Paul D. Miller -DJ Spooky, Vivian Sobchack, W. H. Zangemeister, Thyrza Goodeve, Warren Sack, Zoe Beloff, Yann Beauvais, William Hirstein, Stuart Brisley, Peter Brugger, Ralph Greenspan, Penny Starfield, Kodwo Eshun, Sarat Maharaj, Scott Lash, Steven Holl, Karen Beckman, Colin Gardner, Conerly Casey, Christiane Paul, Chloe Vaitsou, Daniel Blaufuks, Diana Thater, Ken Jacobs, Dennis Balk, David J. McGonigle, Charlie Gere, Armen Avanessian, Arnold H. Modell, Anjan Chatterjee, Andreas Roepstorff, Barbara Marie Stafford, Brian Massumi, Bernard Andrieu, Beau Lotto, Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Talley, John Welchman, Janet Sternburg, Elizabeth S. CohenJonathan Green, Joseph Kosuth, Andrea Grunert, Juli Carson and Lindi Emoungu, Jules Davidoff, Isabelle Moffat, Israel Rosenfeld, Francois Bucher, Eric Duyckaerts, Ellen K. Levy and David E. Levy, gruppo A12 and Francisca Insulza, Gregg Lambert and Gregory Flaxman

Initiated by Warren Neidich

Edward S. Small: Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre (1994)

“Undulating water patterns; designs etched directly into exposed film; computer- generated, pulsating, multihued light tapestries—the visual images that often constitute experimental film and video provide the basis for Edward S. Small’s argument for a new theory defining this often overlooked and misunderstood genre. In a radical revision of film theory incorporating a semiotic system, Small contends that experimental film/video constitutes a mode of theory that bypasses written or spoken words to directly connect Ferdinand de Saussure’s “signifier” and “signified,” the image and the viewer. This new theory leads Small to develop a case for the establishment of experimental film/video as a major genre.

Small contends that the aesthetic of experimental film/video would best be understood as a coordinate major genre separate from genres such as fictive narrative and documentary. He employs eight experimental technical/structural characteristics to demonstrate this thesis: the autonomy of the artist or a-collaborative construction; economic independence; brevity; an affinity for animation and special effects that embraces video technology and computer graphics; use of the phenomenology of mental imagery, including dreams, reveries, and hallucinations; an avoidance of verbal language as either dialogue or narration; an exploration of nonnarrative structure; and a pronounced reflexivity—drawing the audience’s attention to the art of the film through images rather than through the mediation of words.

Along with a theoretical approach, Small provides an overview of the historical development of experimental film as a genre. He covers seven decades beginning in France and Germany in the 1920s with European avant-garde and underground films and ends with a discussion of experimental videos of the 1990s. He highlights certain films and provides a sampling of frames from them to demonstrate the heightened reflexivity when images rather than words are the transmitters: for example, Ralph Steiner’s 1929 H2O, a twelve-minute, wordless, realistic study of water patterns, and Bruce Conner’s 1958 A Movie, which unites his themes of war-weapons-death and sexuality not by narrative digesis but by intellectual montage juxtapositions. Small also examines experimental video productions such as Stephen Beck’s 1977 Video Weavings, which has a simple musical score and abstract images recalling American Indian rugs and tapestries.

Small adds classic and contemporary film theory discussions to this historical survey to further develop his direct-theory argument and his presentation of experimental film/video as a separate major genre. He stresses that the function of experimental film/video is “neither to entertain nor persuade but rather to examine the quite omnipresent yet little understood pictos [semiotic symbols] that mark and measure our postmodern milieu.”

Publisher SIU Press, 1994
ISBN 0809319209, 9780809319206
122 pages

Publisher

EPUB (updated on 2012-7-9)