School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemLiterature as regime (meditations on an emergence)(Manchester University Press, 2002)At the beginning of Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March a young infantry lieutenant, seeing the Emperor accidentally put himself in danger in the course of the battle of Solferino, pushes him to the ground and receives the bullet intended for the Supreme War Lord. Many years later, now a captain and ennobled, Joseph Trotta finds in his son’s school reader an account of this incident.
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ItemEmpire(Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002)Meridian’s importance lies not in the affirmation of the vitality of artists’ careers, nor in the demolition of the ‘next wave’ syndrome, nor even in the revelation of cross-generational continuity through a major exhibition of senior artists in a museum program usually dedicated to the new. Rather, it consists of the opportunity to test absence: that of emerging, not established, contemporary artists. If the present moment (the one represented by emerging artists) is on this occasion not on the museum’s walls, then it stalks the exhibition as its always-present doppelganger, like a transparent overlay. What do I mean? As I’ve noted before, the drive to rethink art is not the property of any one period, even one as productively unstable as the present. As we look at older artists’ work, we are able to see if younger artists are bound by genetic coding to return to conservative certainties, or if the productivist revolution of the early 1970s was a trajectory and a true sea change.
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ItemFrom the religious to the psychological sublime: the fate of Young's Night Thoughts in Blake's The Four Zoas(Locust Hill Press, 2002)Blake's 537 watercolor drawings to Young's Night Thoughts were produced between 1795 and 1797. He began work on The Four Zoas toward the end of this period, in 1796 or 1797. This temporal proximity, along with the profound formal and thematic influence of Night Thoughts on The Four Zoas, explains in part why the watercolors that illustrate the former frequently seem to allude to events detailed in the latter.
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ItemRepresenting the Piazza del Quirinal in the reign of Clement XII: Panini's 'View of the Piazza del Quirinale'( 2002)By the eighteenth century some subjects for Roman view-paintings already had a long pictorial tradition, while others only came to prominence as a result of a site acquiring a new significance in the wake of papal building programs. One of the most important of these new subjects was the Piazza del Quirinale.
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ItemSpreadsheets, sitemaps and search engines: why narrative is marginal to multimedia and networked communication, and why marginality is more vital than universality(British Film Institute, 2002)Media Studies both benefits from and is overdetermined by its double origin, among sociologists increasingly convinced of the centrality of communication to modernity, and among literary schools diminishingly persuaded of the relevance of past literatures to the lived experience and likely futures of their students and themselves. The clash of cultures has been immensely fruitful. But the dialectic of humanities and social science approaches has occasionally broken down: one critical example is the failure of ‘ethnographic’ audience studies top square off with qualitative and statistically based analysis of audiences, leaving a yawning gap between micro-studies of ‘real people’ and macro-studies of whole populations. Studies of the new media are beginning to bridge the gap through the wide-scale interactive dialogues that have begun to break down the impasse. A second unfortunate effect has been the felt necessity to preface any methodological proposal with a diatribe against whatever the author perceives as the previous dominant discourse in the discipline.
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ItemDigital filming and special effects(British Film Institute, 2002)It is curious that digital photography should have spawned a respectable critical literature, while digital cinematography has, as yet, generated very little theoretical work that deals specifically with film. Two possible reasons come to mind. First, digital cinema approaches more closely the culture of animation than lens-based cinematography. And second, the darkroom has always been a key factor in photographic practice, whereas in cinema, postproduction has traditionally been understood as the editing process, rather than the developing and printing of the film strip. I raise this curiosity, which in all likelihood will be a brief and passing phase, only because it raises another conundrum. Traditionally, studies of cinema history have always devoted a chapter to pre-cinematic devices (phenakistoscopes,thaumatropes and so on) and especially to the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and their contemporaries (the most influential, although now controversial, account is Ceram, 1965). Like other contemporary scholars, I rather distrust this continuity model of cinematic development. The quickest way to describe the difference between chronophotography and cinematography is to point out that the unit ofchronophotography is the still frame, but that of cinema is three frames: the one just past, the current one and the one coming up. Crudely put, chronophotography was an analytical medium: cinema is synthetic. This is why chronophotography rather than cinema became the tool of choice for Taylorism and ‘scientific management’.
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ItemRobert Smithson’s ghost in 1920s Hamburg: reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a non-site( 2002)While we can discern an archival turn in contemporary art—of works such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) and of exhibitions such as “Deep Storage” (1998)—the aim of this paper is not merely to identify iconologist Aby Warburg as prefiguring that turn, but to read Warburg’s last work in relation to Earth artist Robert Smithson’s non-sites as a means of opening up discussion on the function of art as archive, and archive as art. The work with which we primarily concern ourselves is Warburg’s final unfinished work, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29)—started the same year as the more famous, equally incomplete collection of quoted texts by Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project (1927-1940). Warburg has always been regarded as a canonical but maverick figure: he was a founder of iconology (the study of the historical development of iconographic symbols) and the key figure in the revival of the study of Antique art (late in his life, through the agency of the Warburg Institute, located first in Hamburg and later in London). Robert Smithson was arguably the key conceptualist artist in the transition between modernist and postmodernist art; he was also a prolific and influential writer on contemporary art. Both arrived at theorisations of art as archive and of memory storage by art just at the point that the life of each was tragically cut short.
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ItemSoftware industry, religious nationalism, and social movements in India: aspects of globalization?(Garamond Press, 2002)Most theories of globalization have as their point of reference experiences in the developed world, thereby confining the debates to time-space compression or distanciation for example, or to quarrels about whether the world is becoming homogenous or heterogeneous. Such theoretical efforts are indicative of both the reoccupations of metropolitan academia, and also the lack of a cohesive theoretical thrust from the leftist intellectuals which takes into account developments in contemporary forms of global capitalism. The sometimes contradictory ways in which the diverse effects globalization are experienced or utilized in different parts of the developed world have come to academic and theoretical attention only very recently. Considering that the majority of the established canon of literature on the subject has been written by academics in the West, this is perhaps not surprising. However as indicated in the assumption that globalization is merely an extension of Western norms of modernity to the developing world, the almost total absence of any attempt to tackle the longstanding relationship between the West and the rest is worth noting, as is the similar neglect of social movements in several parts of the contemporary world which question the values underpinning aspects of globalization, and by doing so challenge the legitimacy of Western dominance.
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ItemThe rules of the game: Evil dead II . . . meet thy doom(Duke University Press, 2002)Interdimensional doorways finally make possible space travel between the two moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. The Union Aerospace Corporation's research into interdimensional travel is a success. Or is it? In a climactic series of events, things start to go terribly wrong. Some people sent through the gateways disappear. Others return from Mars's moons as zombies. Then the moon Deimos vanishes without a trace. Enter the hero-leader of a specialized team of space marines. He sends his troops ahead of him through the interdimensional gateway; armed with a Space Marine Corporation gun, he follows them through, but once on Phobos his worldview changes. The space marines have vanished. Instead, dark surroundings envelop him, and eerie, atmospheric music accentuates the suspense-filled moments. The marine leader begins to scour the corporate installation in search of any living human being ... but it's not the living who come to greet him. Seemingly out of nowhere, an array of bizarre creatures charge down dim-lit corridors and through automatic doors: zombified humans, demons, imps, minotaur-like forms, evil spirits. And so it begins. He must explore the installation to find out what happened, then get the hell out of there at any cost! Picking up weapons along the way, he attacks the monsters like a man gone berserk-with fists, chainsaw, gun, rifle, and missile launcher. His body takes a beating, but his victims also pay the price. Hundreds of those demonic bodies audibly erupt, explode, and splatter before him-and he revels in every gory detail. A sequel to Aliens: Aliens Meets the Demons of Hell? Or perhaps Evil Dead II in outer space? This is no film space. The horror of this story belongs to the cult computer game released by id Software in 1993: Doom: Evil Unleashed.