Spectres of Dada: from Man Ray to Marker and Godard

An analysis of early Dada experimental practice in photography and film with reference to Roland Barthes's <i>Camera lucida</i> and Derrida's theory of spectrality. The chapter considers the legacy of Dada experiments with still and moving images in the work of post-war filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard

Photography as Automaton: Roland Barthes and Fellini’s Mechanical Doll

The stated purpose of Camera Lucida was to champion photography over cinema; however, at a critical moment in the text Roland Barthes turns to an episode from a film, a scene involving an automaton in Fellini’s Casanova, to expound the notion of the photograph as a type of madness, a “shared hallucination.” This essay explores the automaton as a nodal point linking the rival media of cinema and photography. Although Barthes disavows any interest in Fellini’s film beyond the scene in which Casanova dances with an automaton, the film in fact shares many thematic concerns with Camera Lucida. When read in light of the film’s metacinematic preoccupation with mechanical dolls and mannequins, the automaton passage in Camera Lucida may be linked to a longstanding topos in Western culture: a Pygmalionesque fantasy in which the artificial woman (robot, automaton, replicant) metaphorically embodies the allure of visual media

A New Species of \u3ci\u3eNeelides\u3c/i\u3e (Collembola: Neelidae) from the United States

(excerpt) This paper is comprised of the description of a new species of Neelides Caroli (1912) recovered from moss. It becomes only the third described species of the genus. Specimens were recovered by a sugar flotation-centrifugation method (Jenkins, 1964), mounted, and characterized with the aid of a camera lucida. The holotype, some paratypes, and five specimens in 95% ethyl alcohol will be deposited in the Entomology Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 48824

On the Blank

My visual practice is concerned with an articulation of the 'left-out-thing', remnant or blank, produced by and embedded within technologies of representation, which themselves echo the mechanisms through which an identity is formed. As automatic, 'empty apparatus', technological devices threaten as well as construct this self image. This thesis proposes a new theoretical interpretation for art practices that engage with this empty space, or 'shifter'; understood as a form of punctuation around which meaning revolves. Indexing an object both absent and 'has been', the kind of mark making that falls into this category can be identified - like an hysterical symptom - as the reproduction of an unrepresentable sign. It is through my practical work, which explores the link between the photograph, the body, and the written sentence, that my contribution to the field of fine art practice is primarily offered. The way in which an image is put together or a sentence is organised can be considered as an exemplary definition of subjectivity in operation. Yet, as Ann Banfield (1987) has argued, after the invention of the lens, novelistic writing began to index a 'world without a self'. My visual work, which frequently looks like writing, attempts to construct a similar 'grammatical' form: one in which the 'I' is absent. The aim of my work is to stage or record this empty place, understood as a disturbance, impediment or failure within speech; as the text's undertow; and equated with a photographic - or optical -'unconscious'. This failure, this fault in language, detected in the lapses, gaps and silences within a body of writing or in an image - a gap upon which such language systems are nevertheless hinged - is, I suggest, both the place where technology and the non-self are linked and, paradoxically, the site where the I is constituted

Pictures of the past : Benjamin and Barthes on photography.

This paper explores the key moments in Benjamin’s and Barthes’s analyses of the cultural significance of the photograph. For Benjamin these are; the optical unconscious, the transmission of aura, the representation of cultural and political decay and proto-surrealist political commentary. For Barthes they are; the techniques of the photographer, the studium, the punctum and the ecstasy of the image. These rather different approaches to photography reveal a common concern with history. Both authors have written about the nature of historical understanding and photography has provided both with a powerful metaphor. What emerges from their analyses of photographs is that each evokes a double moment of historical awareness; of being both in the present and in the past. For Benjamin this is the ‘spark of contingency’ with which the aura of past existence shines in the present. For Barthes it is the ‘ça-a-été’, the emotional stab of awareness that what is present and visible in the photograph is irretrievably lost in the past

Distribution of catecholamine fibers in the cochlear nucleus of horseshoe bats and mustache bats

The glyoxylic-acid-induced fluorescence technique was applied to demonstrate patterns of catecholaminergic innervation within the auditory brainstem of echolocating bats and the house mouse. In the cochlear nucleus of the rufous horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus rouxi) and the mustache bat (Pteronotus parnelli), species-specific catecholaminergic innervation patterns are found that contrast with the relatively homogeneous innervation in the rodent. In both bats the subnuclei of the cochlear nucleus receive a differentially dense supply of catecholaminergic fibers, and within the subnuclei, the catecholamine innervation densities can be correlated with the tonotopic frequency representation. The areas devoted to the high-frequency echolocation calls are less densely innervated than those regions which are responsive to lower frequencies. Apart from this common scheme, there are noteworthy distinctions between the two bats which correlate with specialized cytoarchitectural features of the cochlear nucleus. The marginal cell group, located medially to the anteroventral cochlear nucleus of Pteronotus, receives the densest supply of catecholaminergic fibers of all auditory nuclei. This plexus is formed by a morphologically distinct population of catecholaminergic fibers

Tiny jubilations: using photography in fiction

Zoë Strachan offers here an examination of the haunting power of photography as a creative stimulus. She discusses the use of photographs in Janice Galloway’s two autobiographies This is Not About Me (2008) and All Made Up (2011), as well as her own use of photographic inspiration for her currently untitled new novel, an extract from which closes the special issue

Writing Sample

From hyperlinkage, hyperlinkage , The Voice , Camera Lucida , Mrs. T. Contemplates Divorce , Mrs. T. Prepa res Fruit , Mrs. T. Mends Clothes , To-Do List , Frangipani , and The Forward-Projection of a Revival . From Light. glass elevator , Leaping , Gongs, Alarms , Mentakab , Richmond Hill , and Hedge Fund Manager