Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Review of Adrian J. Ivankhiv\u27s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

The theatre and its screen double

This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg's Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012). It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. After a brief evocation of Artaud's writings in "theatre and cruelty" and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre's evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the "choreographic unconscious," as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell's dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the "camera-actor." A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell's direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance

'Real' Nature, 'Aesthetic' Nature and the Making of Artworks: Some Challenges of Cross-Cultural Collaboration

The social and educational benefits of cultural exchange within the realm of art are often asserted. However, what of the meaning and value of the actual artworks arising from those exchanges? This paper analyses the barriers to shared understanding that arose in relation to an extended exchange between Japanese and British artists and philosophers on the connection between Nature and Art, 2011-13. First, cultural interfacing is explored in relation to four types– combinatorial, hierarchic, hermeneutic, and thematic – and the case is made that communalities of practice alone cannot guarantee true cultural integration or understanding. Next, six Japanese and Western concepts of ‘Nature’ – as an ontological entity, a class of objects, a domain, a force, a system and an Ideal - are distinguished in relation to the history and beliefs of those cultures. The argument then moves to the interface between Art and Nature: Nature can be the subject of Art, but can it literally be its content? Finally, the relationship between culture and theory is itself explored in relation to two artworks, and their supposed meanings and links. The Appendices include a detailed summary of the distinctions between Japanese and Western aesthetic systems

Nietzschean Genealogy and Hegelian History in the Genealogy of Morals

I would like to offer an interpretation of the Genealogy of Morals, of the relationship of master morality to slave morality, and of Nietzsche\u27s philosophy of history that is different from the interpretation that is normally offered by Nietzsche scholars. Contrary to Nehamas, Deleuze, Danto, and many others, I wish to argue that Nietzsche does not simply embrace master morality and spurn slave morality.1 I also wish to reject the view, considered simply obvious by most scholars, that the iibermensch develops out of, or on the model of, the master, not the slave.2 And to make the case for all of this, I want to explore the relationship between Hegel\u27s master-slave dialectic and the conflict Nietzsche sees between master morality and slave morality. That Nietzsche does not intend us to recall the famous master-slave dialectic of Hegel\u27s Phenomenology as we read the Genealogy of Morals, I find difficult to believe. Yet very few commentators ever notice, let alone explore, this connection. Those who do, like Deleuze, Greene, and Houlgate, think that Nietzsche, in direct opposition to Hegel, simply sides with the master, not the slave, and that Nietzschean genealogy renounces all Hegelian dialectic - or any sort of Hegelian developmental view ofhistory.3 I do not think any of these views are correct. I wish to argue that Nietzsche is very much influenced by Hegel and that Nietzschean genealogy and Hegelian history are intimately linked in the Genealogy of Morals. Thus I think that there is a limit that must be put to the recent tendency, otherwise most insightful and illuminating, to see Nietzsche as radically postmodem, as totally breaking with the nineteenth century, and, certainly, as having little to do with Hegel

Francis Bacon and the practice of painting

This article addresses the question about why painting continues to be relevant in our contemporary cultural climate. A key reason can be located in the means by which the material of paint can be utilized, manipulated, and perceived through entire sensory and bodily mechanisms. As the practice of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) demonstrates, it is within the elusive behaviour and handling of pigment that the full transformative potential of painting can be released. In fact it can activate a whole field of sensory responses on the part of painter and viewer. The painter can manipulate the material to achieve a variety of effects but needs also to acknowledge how the material can potentially assume an independent life of its own, an almost unruly character. The strength and enduring quality of painting which links modern to postmodern practice, lies in its potential to utilise the painter's tacit skills as well as releasing the inherent and ‘unruly’ qualities of the pigment. The potential of painting practice lies within the orbit of the individual painter who can recognize implicitly how to let the paint ‘work’ according to the needs of the image being constructed

Social spatialization and everyday life

This editorial introduction discusses the problematic ‘demonology’ of spatial analyses that attempt to understand the logic of the social in terms of subject-based origins. Taking the poststructuralist notion of decentred subjectivity to task, it uses the metaphor of exorcism to approach everyday life as a haunted space. Instead of identifying the true demons behind the voices rendering an account of everyday life, it shifts methodological attention to the incommensurable multiplicity of traces through which we map and narrate a hermeneutics of becoming

Becoming-Other: Foucault, Deleuze, and the Political Nature of Thought

In this paper I employ the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze’s notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze’s thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ which, insofar as it takes ‘recognition’ as its model, can only ever think what is already solidified and sedimented as true, in light of existing structures and institutions of power. Then, I examine Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and the notion of the ‘thought of the outside,’ showing the ‘outside’ as the unthought that lies at the heart of thinking itself, as both its condition and its impossibility. Insofar as it is essential to thinking itself, finally, I argue that the passage of thought to the outside is not an absolute flight out of this world, as Hallward claims, but rather, a return of the different that constitutes the Self for Deleuze. Thinking is an ongoing movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or as Foucault says, death and life. Thinking, as Deleuze understands it, is essentially creative; it reconfigures the virtual, thereby literally changing the world. Thinking is therefore, according to Deleuze, thoroughly political

The Forking Paths: an interactive cinema experience

The project The Forking Paths aims to create a set of interactive cinematographic narratives, within an applied research that seeks to transfer the spectator from an extradiegetic level to an intradiegetic level, creating a metalepsis. The intention is, above all, to analyze the possibilities of the spectator’s identification as the main character, by the manipulation of the idea of time in Cinema. We aim to reach this proposal through the use of specific narrative resources, as well as through the possibility of choice between alternative image flows. The project The forking paths is intended to be available in different media and supports suchas the Internet, touch sensitive screen devices and conventional cinemas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Coldness and Cruelty as Performance in Deleuze's Proust

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, ..