The Ghostularity

What will be the fate of ME in the realm of digital ME-ness

The Passing of Print

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialization of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies – scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them – and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive

Documentary style as post-truth monstrosity in the mockumentary horror film

This article argues that the mockumentary horror film uses its stylistic hybridity to address the ontological and epistemic challenges posed to factual media in a post-truth and post-modern age through an analysis of the film Apollo 18 (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2011). By adopting the visual aesthetics associated with factual media, and particularly those associated with post-9/11 surveillance culture, the form challenges the endurance of longstanding cultural structures (news, documentary, factual broadcasting) upon which our conceptualisation of the world is founded. In this respect, the boundary-crossing aesthetics parallel longstanding conceptualisation of the monster in horror. This aesthetic approach is most clearly manifested through the emulation of medium-specific textural artefacts which accrue across the film in a structured manner to create a situation in which the documentary investigation records its own destruction. The mockumentary horror film literalises the broader conceptual failure of the documentary project to work through and make sense of unresolved traumas and stand up to the threats posed by the epistemic horrors of a post-truth cultural turn

Mind Control

Ce volume intitulé Mind Control est consacré aux relations entre les expérimentations artistiques et les techniques de conditionnement psychologique au cours de la période contemporaine (XIXe-XXIe siècles). Il analyse la culture visuelle d'œuvres d’art qui jouent sur la reprise, le contre-pied, le déplacement voire l’instrumentalisation de divers protocoles mis en place dans les laboratoires de psychologie. Entre suggestion et hypnose, test comportemental et images subliminales, parasitage et lavage de cerveau, ce numéro croise des objets, des discours et des dispositifs d’influence très variés, de l’art de la publicité au cinéma expérimental, du « design pédagogique » à la vidéo, de la « musique d’ameublement » à la performance, jusqu’aux réseaux sociaux les plus récents, pour interroger les stratégies de persuasion et de contrôle dans nos sociétés contemporaines et le rôle des pratiques artistiques dans leur mise à distance ou leur détournement critique. Cet ouvrage, préparé sous la direction de Pascal Rousseau, est le onzième volume de la collection Histo.Art, présentant les travaux de l’École doctorale Histoire de l’art de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne