School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemImagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014(Informa UK Limited, 2023-01-02)The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthro-pological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.
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ItemAfter the Future: Inhabiting Apathy in New Media Arts(MIMESIS EDIZIONI, 2022)“Media arts” is a phrase that has circulated for a century now, dealing with electromechanical media (radio, film, rotary press, photography) and more recently with electronic media (video, electronic music, digital arts). With benefit of hindsight it became doctrine that all forms of art were media (Greenberg’s and McLuhan’s different historical versions of medium specificity); that all media were digital (Kittler) and – in what may well be the hegemonic idea of the 21st century – that all human activity, even all ecological activity, has always been fundamentally communicative; that we have been able to conceive of an aesthetic without medium. No matter that the substitute – the concept, especially in anti-retinal art – is in many respects a discrete medium embedded in the entrails of late 20th century theories of language. This article first proposes this diagnosis, then sets out to decipher why the contradictions of art and technology, and more broadly of science and the social, have brought us to this conjuncture, and what kind of opportunity it presents for the (re)making of both arts and media.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntroduction. Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media(MIMESIS EDIZIONI, 2022)Discussions around art and technology may seem rather predictable nowadays. Technology is everywhere; it surrounds our bodies, guides our behaviours, provides suggestions, helps us and often even replaces us. Technology frightens us and fascinates us; it sometimes seems to be close and, at other times, appears remote. Precisely due to its pervasiveness in our lives, it seems to be everywhere, even in the world of contemporary art. In any exhibition, biennial or art festival, there is something “technological”. Videos, sound installations, robotic or mechanical kinetics, the use of the Internet or geo-localisation, augmented, virtual and mixed reality, artificial intelligence can also be found in the artistic production of people who, at first sight and until a few years ago, we would not have included under the label of new media art.
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ItemTurning disaster into crisis(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2022-07)This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities.
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ItemPandemic: Invisibility and silence(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-04-07)Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take whips to outsiders whose gender or skin colour they despise at the behest of billionaire warlords from the Texas border to Kabul. But COVID-19 coincides with some intriguing cultural novelties, most of all a plague of visibility traced here through Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, paired with a simultaneous mode of disappearance associated with the video image. Hegemonic transitions, the rise of financialization, and extractive postcolonization tie pandemic to fading (and therefore vengeful) American individualism and the rising (and therefore aggressive) Chinese command economy. The virus is occasion for profit: only a new and ecologically scaled cosmopolitanism can save us.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)
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ItemEcocritical Media Arts and the War on Terra(The New Media Caucus, 2021-11-02)Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endless opportunities for misunderstanding when we capture, store, and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concern the construction of a “we” that embraces the human and non- human victims of ecocide. The master’s tools might dismantle the master’s house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than- human social change?
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ItemAgainst the New Normal(Duke University Press, 2021-03-01)COVID-19 is now part of the resources out of which any future must be made. The temptation is to curl back into private misery and fatalism. The opportunity is to further the design of neonationalist, neoliberal returns to pre-1917 norms of extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and unmitigated exploitation of technical and ecological resources. The challenge is to build a future of public health, wealth, education, and environmental justice.
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ItemLimen, portal, network subjectivities(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-01-02)Limina, the thresholds between worlds are by nature sacred. Passage between the worlds of the living and the dead is strange and holy. For the ancients, and for the religions of the book, precise places of transition to another world are scenes of veneration. ...
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ItemImaging Global Communications: An Ecocritique(Intellect, 2020-01-01)Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.