Craig Dworkin: No Medium (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, art theory, attention, body, book, conceptual art, dada, film, fluxus, literature, media, music, painting, paper, phonograph, sculpture, sex, silence, temporality, time, translation, typography
“In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.
Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston’s erased copy of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston’s marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin links Cage’s composition to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music.
Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 0262018705, 9780262018708
219 pages
Interview with the author (Critical Margins)
Author’s lecture at Penn Poetry & Poetics (video, 19 min)
Reviews: Johanna Drucker (Los Angeles Review of Books), Michael Leong (Hyperallergic).
Commentary: Richard Marshall (3:AM Magazine).
Friedrich Kittler, Ana Ofak (eds.): Medien vor den Medien (2007) [German]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, cultural techniques, image, literature, media, media theory, mediality, music, music history, philosophy, sound, time
“Das Dazwischen (to metaxy) macht das Sehen und Hören, die Erkenntnis und die Liebe erst möglich – das überliefern uns Texte der Antike. Die Medien prägen so unser Wissen und verstören unsere Sinne seit jeher. In der deutschen Medienwissenschaft ist es fast zur Selbstverständlichkeit geworden, nur heutige oder doch neuzeitliche Medien zu erforschen. Nun geht aber schon der Begriff “Medium” auf die griechische Antike zurück. Eben diesem Sachverhalt sucht der Band Medien vor den Medien gerecht zu werden. Vom Feuertelegraphen zur Ontologie, vom Marienglas zur sakralen Lichtarchitektur und immer wieder vom Ton zum Bild. Da die Medien der Antike zunächst zur Sprache kommen, wird es möglich, Brücken zu anderen Wissenschaftskulturen und in jene Neuzeit zu schlagen, die unseren kurrenten Begriff physikalischer und technischer Medien prägt. Das Buch richtet sich an Philosophen, Kunst-, Kultur- und Medienwissenschaftler.”
Publisher Fink, Munich, 2007
Kulturtechnik series
ISBN 3770542843, 9783770542840
282 pages
via adorno77
Cultural techniques at Monoskop wiki
PDF (53 MB, no OCR, updated on 2020-4-20)
Comment (0)Etienne Turpin (ed.): Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropocene, architecture, climate, climate crisis, design, earth, ecology, geology, meteorology, philosophy, science, time, weather
“Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy intensifies the potential of this multidisciplinary discourse by bringing together essays, conversations, and design proposals that respond to the “geological imperative” for contemporary architecture scholarship and practice.”
Contributors include Nabil Ahmed, Meghan Archer, Adam Bobbette, Emily Cheng, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Seth Denizen, Mark Dorrian, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Hirmer, Jane Hutton, Eleanor Kaufman, Amy Catania Kulper, Clinton Langevin, Michael C.C. Lin, Amy Norris, John Palmesino, Chester Rennie, François Roche, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Isabelle Stengers, Paulo Tavares, Etienne Turpin, Eyal Weizman, Jane Wolff, Guy Zimmerman.
Publisher Open Humanities Press, December 2013
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 3.0 Licence
ISBN 1607853078, 9781607853077
250 pages
HTML (added on 2016-7-19)
PDF, PDF, PDF (10 MB, updated on 2016-7-19)