Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 4: From Sign to Signal (2012)

“Since the 1990s there has been intensified focus on the concepts of performativity, the relational, and affect in the humanities. Scholars from different fields have in a variety of ways embraced these notions in their accounts of contemporary culture, and as such they also form the backdrop of this thematic collection of articles entitled From Sign to Signal. It seems, however, as if today’s media situation–the globally evident usage of media technologies–requires a new theoretical approach in order to deal with the intersections of technology and aesthetics, since in these cases the sign often falls short. It has therefore been the ambition of this collection to invite scholars within the humanities to take part in a discussion on the implications of a gradual shift from a (linguistically framed) paradigm of the sign to a new paradigm connected with media augmented environments.

As the term for this new paradigm we have chosen the ‘signaletic material’, coined by Gilles Deleuze in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze developed this notion in order to stress that film in his view of contemporary or modern cinema had altogether eliminated classical (literary) thoughts of plot and narration. Toward the end of Cinema 2 it becomes clear that the notion of the ‘signaletic material’ might be developed to cover all kinds of filmic and electronic material as well as the emerging new media technologies.” (from Foreword)

Edited by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, John Sundholm and Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen
Publisher Co-Action Publishing, Järfälla, Sweden, 2012
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License
eISSN 2000-4214
134 pages

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Hendrik Petrus Berlage: Thoughts on Style, 1886–1909 (1996)

“Looking back to the period around 1910, Mies van der Rohe once commented that there was but a single architect then working on the European architectural scene, “Berlage was a lone giant.”

In parallel activities as both an architect and an architectural philosopher, H. P. Berlage created a series of buildings that witnessed the gestation and birth of architectural Modernism and a body of writings that probed in depth the problems and possibilities of this new style. But whereas his Stock Exchange in Amsterdam, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the new century, Berlage’s passionate writings on architecture, which exerted an equal influence on his contemporaries, have often been neglected.

In his wide-ranging critical introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte convincingly demonstrates that one corpus of work cannot be understood without taking into account the other: Berlage’s writings inform his architecture to the same extent that his buildings reflect his probing aesthetic deliberations. Berlage’s principal texts are here brought together in English translation for the first time. Collectively, they present to the English-language reader a new and vital chapter in the history of European modernism.”

Introduction by Iain Boyd Whyte
Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte and Wim de Wit
Publisher Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica/CA, 1996
Texts & Documents series
ISBN 0892363339, 9780892363339
331 pages

Review: Suzanne Frank (J Arch Education 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Heather Davis, Etienne Turpin (eds.): Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (2015)

“Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists.”

Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow.

Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2015
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license
ISBN 1785420054, 9781785420054
402 pages

Review: Scott Volz (CAA Reviews, 2018).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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