Matthew Fuller, Olga Goriunova: Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (2019)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, animal, chance, ecology, environment, ethics, forest, individuation, nature, philosophy, plants, subject, territory, theory, virtuality
“Bleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.
Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.
Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2019
Posthumanities series, 53
ISBN 9781517905521, 1517905524
xxviii+192 pages
PDF (6 MB)
Comment (0)Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen, Marten Spångberg (eds.): Post-Dance (2017)
Filed under book, proceedings | Tags: · aesthetics, dance, theory
Post-dance was a conference held at MDT in Stockholm, 14-16 October 2015, created by Danjel Andersson, André Lepecki and Gabriel Smeets.
“Postdance or Post-dance or POSTDANCE is an open source concept. We reversed a normal conference. Instead of saying what Postdance is, we in vited a wide range of thinkers to fill the concept with us. To let it be open, and a bit weird, and by doing that keeping it urgent. And now post-dance is a book.” (from the Introduction)
Contributions by Alice Chauchat, Ana Vujanović, Andre Lepecki, Jonathan Burrows, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, Charlotte Szász, Josefihe Wikström, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Samlingen, Valeria Graziano, Samira Elagoz, Ellen Söderhult, Edgar Schmitz, Manuel Scheiwiller, Alina Popa, Antonia Rohwetter, and Max Wallenhorst.
Publisher MDT, Stockholm, 2017
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9789198389104, 9198389106
393 pages
Conference (2015)
Publisher
WorldCat
Eleni Ikoniadou, Scott Wilson (eds.): Media After Kittler (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, media, media studies, media theory, philosophy, technology, theory
“Is it possible to incite a turn towards Media Philosophy, a field that accounts for the autonomy of media, for machine agency and for the new modalities of thought and subjectivity that these enable, rather than dwelling on representations, audiences and extensions of the self?
In the wake of the field-defining work done by Friedrich Kittler, this important collection of essays takes a philosophical approach to the end of the media era in the traditional sense and outlines the implications of a turn that sees media become concepts of the middle, of connection, and of multitude—across diverse disciplines and theoretical perspectives. An expert panel of contributors, working at the cutting edge of media theory, analyze the German thinker’s legacy and the possibilities his thought can unfold for media theory. This book examines the present and future condition of mediation, within the wider context of media studies in a digital age.”
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield International, London, 2015
ISBN 9781783481217, 1783481218
vi+197 pages
Review: Clare Pettitt (Media History, 2016).
Conference (with audio recordings, 2013)
Publisher
WorldCat