Franz Roh and Visual Juxtaposition in Foto-Auge

This study of Foto-Auge (1929) is grounded on the approach of Franz Roh and aims to unlock the book’s meaning through an analysis of layout and visual sequence. This thesis also demonstrates how Foto-Auge proclaims photography’s ability not merely to record, but to disrupt any sense of reality in images

Watch-grab-arrange-see : thinking with motion images via streams and collages

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-105).by Edward Lee Elliott.M.S.V.S

Occlusion: Creating Disorientation, Fugue, and Apophenia in an Art Game

Occlusion is a procedurally randomized interactive art experience which uses the motifs of repetition, isolation, incongruity and mutability to develop an experience of a Folie àDeux: a madness shared by two. It draws from traditional video game forms, development methods, and tools to situate itself in context with games as well as other forms of interactive digital media. In this way, Occlusion approaches the making of game-like media from the art criticism perspective of Materiality, and the written work accompanying the prototype discusses critical aesthetic concerns for Occlusion both as an art experience borrowing from games and as a text that can be academically understood in relation to other practices of media making. In addition to the produced software artifact and written analysis, this thesis includes primary research in the form of four interviews with artists, authors, game makers and game critics concerning Materiality and dissociative themes in game-like media. The written work first introduces Occlusion in context with other approaches to procedural remixing, Glitch Art, net.art, and analogue and digital collage and décollage, with special attention to recontextualization and apophenia. The experience, visual, and audio design approach of Occlusion is reviewed through a discussion of explicit design choices which define generative space. Development process, release process, post-release distribution, testing, and maintenance are reviewed, and the paper concludes with a description of future work and a post- mortem discussion. Included as appendices are a full specification document, script, and transcripts of all interviews

The computer as an irrational cabinet.

This thesis and its accompanying project are concerned with the use of digital technology in the representation of material culture. The thesis aims to find ways of using such technology that are appropriate to our present needs and to its potential. The computer is a technology which we understand, interact with and relate to through metaphor. I propose that many of the metaphors through which we understand it invoke the idea of an enclosed space. The use of such a trope might seem suitable when using computers for representing museum collections, or material culture in general, since it invokes the enclosed space of the museum. I examine how this idea of enclosure is manifested in computer developments such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. I also look at how these developments are congruent with perspectival modes of visual representation privileged in the modern era. I argue that such metaphors and forms of representation, whether manifested in visual arts, the museum, or computer applications are problematic, bound up as they are with modern western ideas of mastery and transcendence, which are presently being subjected to critiques from various quarters. Throughout the modern era there have been forms of representation which have contested the dominant visual mode of modernity. These include the art of the Baroque in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in this century, the work of the Surrealists. In contrast to the rational, orthogonal space of modernity, both these deal with complex and fragmented representations of spaces and time. Such developments have been discussed as forms of representation appropriate to contemporary concerns about knowledge They also have a corollary in computing developments, such as multimedia and hypermedia, Yet, I argue, those working in multimedia have in the main failed to exploit the potential of such developments to enable new ways of representing knowledge. I propose looking to both the Baroque and Surrealism to find possible models and strategies for use in multimedia in the representation of material culture. In relation to this I describe practical work done in conjunction with this thesis which uses these models as the basis of a piece of multimedia software for the representation of material culture

Antropofagia and Constructive Universalism: A Diptych

This study proposes a rethinking of the word-image relation through an examination of Joaquin Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism (ca.1934-1949) and the Brazilian Modernist movement of Antropofagia (1928-ca.1934). By placing both in the close relation of a ‘diptych,’ I argue for a new reading of Torres-García’s visual work as well as a different understanding of Antropofagia. In the first part of this work, I argue, through a close reading and viewing of Torres-García’s work, that the constitutive instability between word/image has been overlooked in favour of, on the one hand, an appropriation in terms of a ‘deviation’ from the canon of Geometric Abstraction and on the other hand as a paradigm of Pre-Columbian, Inca abstraction. Both discursive gestures repress the matter of visual aesthesis. Against this strategy of legibility, I propose a counter-reading through the concepts of ‘graphism’ (Leroi-Gourhan), ‘manuscription’ (Sarabia), the ‘sensory field’ (Lyotard) and the hypericon. These concepts allow contingency to find its way back into Torres-García’s oeuvre in opposition to neo-Classicist misappropriations. Throughout my argument, it will become evident that Torres-García’s paintings bespeak an irrepressible mestizaje, an intertwining of the figural with the abstract. It is this tension animating Torres-García’s work that has been neglected by the disciplining of discourse’s ‘logic of illustration.’ In the second part of the study, I take Antropofagia not so much as a historically determinate period in the narrative of Brazilian Modernism, but as a heuristic for the thinking through of the ‘inconstancy’ of the relation between word and image in its New World Baroque vertigo. This vertigo is politically charged, and amounts to a ‘counter-Conquest’ (Lezama Lima) of the clear and distinct distribution of legibility and visibility inherited through coloniality. The metaphoric economy of cannibalism in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) in conjunction with the visual work of Tarsila do Amaral and the ‘re-discovery’ of Barroco Mineiro by the Brazilian avant-garde deconstructs the narrative of rupture so as to engage in a complex ‘route to roots’ highlighting the artifice of origin. This same artifice marks Torres-García’s oeuvre, and by ‘closing’ the diptych, I show how abstraction folds back into a Baroque superimposition

Digital découpage: reading and prototyping the material poetics and queer ephemera of the Edwin Morgan scrapbooks, 1931-1966

My thesis takes as its object of study sixteen scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1966 by Scots Makar Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), which are currently housed in the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. I focus on reading the Morgan scrapbooks through two paradigms. Firstly, I approach the scrapbooks as materiallyspecific texts that demand close readings not only of their content, but of their forms and format. Specifically, I read the material practices and poetics of Morgan’s scrapbooking through queer theories of ephemera and temporalities, even in cases where the contents of the scrapbooks are not themselves overtly queer, and argue that these queer poetics extend as an influence throughout Morgan’s broader literary corpus. I also argue that the scrapbooks speak through “language[s] of juxtaposition” (Garvey, Writing with Scissors 131) that can be productively unfolded through close readings informed by Bruno Latour’s sociological theories. Secondly, I approach the Morgan scrapbooks as a test case to demonstrate the value of using digital humanities and visualization methods to engage ephemeral archival items in ‘research through design’ processes. My thesis interprets the Morgan scrapbooks through the creation of custom-built databases and prototypical interfaces that make discoverable the scrapbooks’ rich metadata, while also arguing that Morgan’s scrapbooks are particularly open to such digital interventions due to their reliance on intermediation and their documentation of technological innovations. The three visual prototypes resulting from my project are not intended to reproduce faithfully or replace the scrapbooks, but rather to experiment with how the media specificities of the digital can be put into conversation with Morgan’s materially-complex and technologically-aware scrapbooks. The prototypes also enable explorations of the productive points of contact that exist between scrapbooks, databases, and prototypes as forms of information management and tools of interpretation. Collectively, these two approaches demonstrate the value of, and need for, close readings and innovative digital remediations for scrapbooked (hi)stories like Morgan’s, as well as for many other ephemeral and marginalized material archives

The Chatter of the Visible

The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it—a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres). McBride’s contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a culturally specific form of cognition

Conceptual Nationalisms: Conceptual Book-Works, Countercultural Imaginaries and the Neo-Avant-Garde in Canada and Québec, 1967-1974

Recent exhibitions have redefined conceptualism as a global movement that emerged alongside locally situated experiences of national liberation movements, New Left social activism and countercultural world-making. This thesis proposes an art historical term, “conceptual nationalisms,” as a contribution to the historicization of conceptualism as the movement emerged in Canada and Québec. The term retrospectively describes book-works and magazines produced by an overlapping artistic and literary neo-avant-garde, which evince the symbolic value of print media forms during the post-Centennial period (1967-1974). As funding for the arts increased and converged with labour policy in this period, the relationship between state ideology and a conceptualist critique of the art object as a commodity became intrinsically intertwined. Many conceptual book-works and artists’ magazines were produced alongside publications issued by literary small presses, as such, this thesis also recognizes parallels taking place between the linguistic turn in conceptual art and literary movements such as concrete, visual and sound poetry that emphasize the materiality of the signifier in language. This thesis introduces three primary case studies: Roy Kenzie Kiyooka’s "Transcanada Letters" (Talonbooks, 1975); the Image Bank "International Image Exchange Directory" (Talonbooks, 1972), which parallels the publication of the first three issues of General Idea’s "File" magazine (1972-1989); and a utopian “linguistic space” produced in the early days of Véhicule Art gallery, with reference to several publications including the magazine, "Médiart" (1971-1973), "Quebec underground, 1962-1972 (Éditions Médiart, 1973), and Bill Vazan’s "Contacts" (Véhicule Press, 1973). I also refer to two foundational works: Joyce Wieland’s "True Patriot Love/Véritable amour patriotique" (National Gallery of Canada, 1971) and Michael Ondaatje’s long poem, "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (House of Anansi, 1970). These case studies draw from a wide range of interdisciplinary thinkers including art historians, theorists of utopian thought and the creation of counterpublics, and scholars of literature and print culture, with particular reference to the national publics documented through the encyclopedic "History of the Book in Canada" project. Combining visual analysis, bibliographic and archival methods with research-creation, this thesis argues that works of conceptual nationalisms arise from countercultural social scenes where a politics of eros challenged fixed identity dispositions imposed through media, both domestic and imported. Invoking the affective state Herbert Marcuse described at the time as, “polymorphous perversity,” these case studies disidentify with a sense of nationhood based in shared language, blood or territory, relying instead upon the psychological drive of libido as a universalizing biological trait. The visual symbols underpinning national identity are simultaneously internalized and reinvested with an erotic ambiguity that manifests as Romantic irony and self-parody. Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, one could say that these case studies use communications media to produce a “counter-environment” within the nation. As works of conceptual nationalism, they reflexively engage an aesthetic transformation of the social imaginary that constitutes a nation-state

Soundings: documentary film and the listening experience

The associative, connotative and sheer emotive power of sound has the capacity to move and shake us in a myriad of direct, subtle and often profound ways. The implications of this for its role as speech, location sound, and music in documentary film are far-reaching. The writers in this book draw on the lived experience of sound’s resounding capacity as primary motivation for exploring these implications, united by the overarching theme of how listening is connected with acts of making sense both on its own terms and in conjunction with viewing