Stamatia Portanova: Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (2013)

“Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software’s capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become.

Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think—rather than just perform or perceive—movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance: a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, Moving without a Body offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262018926, 9780262018920
200 pages

Reviews: Donnarumma (Mute, 2014), Murphy (Afterimage, 2014), Thain (Digicult).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (11 MB)

Fionnghuala Sweeney, Kate Marsh (eds.): Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde (2013)

“This collection of ten essays makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. The chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2013
ISBN 074864640X, 9780748646401
264 pages

Review: Dominic Thomas (French Studies, 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2020-6-9)

Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919-1923 (1923) [German]

This work was published on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition in August and September 1923 in 2,000 copies (another 300 were printed in English and 300 in Russian). The colour plates include nine original lithographs by Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, L. Hirschfeld-Mack (2), R. Paris, P. Keler and W. Molar, K. Schmidt (2), and F. Schleifer. The texts are by Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Gertrud Grunow, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, Lothar Schreyer, Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer and others.

Publisher Bauhausverlag, Weimar and Munich, 1923
Typography L. Moholy-Nagy
Cover design Herbert Mayer
Print F. Bruckmann, Munich (texts), V. Lübecke, Erfurt (printing blocks for the 4-color prints), and Dietsch & Brückner, Weimar (colour plates)
225 pages, 20 colour plates, 147 halftone ills., 25 × 26 cm
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

PDF (325 MB, updated on 2018-3-6)
See also Bauhaus publications on Monoskop wiki.