Charles Merewether (ed.): The Archive (2006)

“In the modern era, the archive—official or personal—has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive—no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.

This volume surveys the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive—as idea and as physical presence—from Freud’s “mystic writing pad” to Derrida’s “archive fever”; from Christian Boltanski’s first autobiographical explorations of archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in the present.”

Publisher Whitechapel, London, and MIT Press, 2006
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262633388, 9780262633383
207 pages

Reviews: Sas Mays (caa.reviews 2009), Barbara Beckers (Incirculation 2012).

Publisher
Publisher
Worldcat

PDF (13 MB, updated on 2016-8-8)

David Thorburn, Henry Jenkins (eds.): Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (2004)

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors’ introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and “the virtual window.”

The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
Media in Transition series
ISBN 0262701073, 9780262701075
416 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)