Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (think Media: Egs Media Philosophy Series)

Cara Judea Alhadeff

Atropos Press

<p>The second and revised edition of a groundbreaking philosophical treatise from a leading authority on the theory and practice of electronic culture in the media age. Continuing the work of post(e)-pedagogy of Applied Grammatology, Ulmer's Teletheory is the second book of his trilogy on the modes of inquiry which concludes with Heuretics. Teletheory addresses the paradigm shift from literacy to electracy, using philosophy of science as well as Roland Barthes' design of an image rhetoric. The invention of a new historiography as experience of subjectivation culminates in a poetics extracted from philosophy of science, critical theory, and videography, which is tested with a sample of the genre: "Derrida at the Little Bighorn." The functionality of collage-montage as logic is probed, resulting in a position of singularity.</p>

Teletheory

Politics & Social Sciences

Ulmer, Gregory L.

Philosophy

The Ethics of Uncertainty asks what it means to live, act, decide, and respond responsibly, in the aporia of freedom itself - a freedom which on one hand opens us to the open space of possible possibilities, and on the other, leaves us no stable ground or measure for pre/determined decision making. The aporia of freedom is conditioned by the indeterminate space of knowing we must make decisions, and yet, at the same time, we cannot call on an absolute authority or measure as a guide. Aporias open us to freedom, the place where, as Derrida has taught us, an ethical decision may occur. Allowing indeterminacy to exist in our becoming allows a continuous coming to be with others - a becoming always open to the "to come" (Derrida) of the future. Always drawing us toward the possibility of making a decision within the fabric of indecision, aporias give us the possibility of ethical becoming. Overall, this text points us to the possibility of living an ethical life in a world without absolute measure - an ethics, in other words, of uncertainty. Michael Anker currently teaches philosophy at the College of New Rochelle in New York.

The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings (Think Media: Egs Media Philosophy)

Anker, Michael

Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death explore the representation of art, artists and art history in film through two primary questions. The first: why are there so many representations of stereotypical mad artists, particularly psychopathic killers and suicidal artists in film when there are so few clearly documented cases of such artists within the history of art? And the second question, with two components: is there a political meaning that is able to be assigned to the proliferation of such films in contemporary society, and what does this say about the producers of such material and the consuming interest in art, death, and crime, of the cinema going public? Employing Jacques Derrida's "four times around" deconstructive process, the author takes the philosophical injunction to explore the surrounds and approaches to his chosen subjects -- the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Roger Corman, Tim Burton, Peter Greenaway, among others -- paying specific attention to "the work, frame, passé partout (key), title, signature, museum, archive, discourse, marketplace -- in short, wherever there is legislation by marking of the limit" (Derrida, 1987). Each of the chapters move beyond the two original questions and their related components, across and through - trans/acting - various theoretical, historical and critical fields into specific domains of philosophical and political enquiry; for example, the question of the other in the construction of social stereotypes, and the political and libidinal economy of various types of humour: parody, irony and satire. Employing the post-Freudian phantasmatic models developed by Giorgio Agamben, the author discusses the historical construction of various stereotypes for artists, particularly the manner in which these have been ideologically inscribed into the cultural dominant, and thereby become available for reproduction, both in terms of artist's presentation of self in everyday life, and also in terms of cultural representations within the domains of mass and popular culture, specifically cinema. Bruce Barber is an interdisciplinary artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he directs the MFA Program at NSCAD University. He is the research coordinator at the European Graduate School, EGS and the editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization; Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967-1973. Co-editor, with Guilbaut, S., and O'Brian J., Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power and the State. Editor, Condé + Beveridge: Class Works (2008); author of Performance [Performance] and Performers: Essays and Conversations edited by Marc Léger (2008).

Trans/Actions: Art, Film and Death

Humor & Entertainment

Barber, Bruce

Movies

The utilization of an instrumental model that sees language as a means of bringing us towards fixed meaning is one of the greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of the dynamics of communication. An acceptance of language from this perspective constricts our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or more accurately, experience with an aesthetic work. In this text, Paul DeNicola explores the impact of conceiving the literature of Franz Kafka in light of the concept of "Pure Mediality" - an a-teleological approach that calls upon the thinking of continental philosophers from Nietzsche to Derrida. The author argues that Kafka recognizes the inherent violence in any conceptual understanding of language, and therefore conceives literary or poetic language as capable of an un-judging that deconstructs any previously judged version of the real. DeNicola contends that Kafka's literary work is an embrace of infinite relation, suspension of judgment and radical undecidabilty. His art of Pure Mediality is an art of alterity, constituting a wounding or opening by alterity that demands a response. It is this character of responsiveness to the other that implies ethical potentialities.Professor Paul DeNicola teaches philosophy at the European Graduate School (Switzerland) and is Associate Director of the Conference Board’s Corporate Governance Center in New York City.

Literature as Pure Mediality: Kafka and the Scene of Writing

Literature & Fiction

Denicola, Paul

History & Criticism

<p>The world overflows with stimuli. Many of these are advertising messages that will never know whether we hear them. They are not alive but continue speaking. We adjust our filters and stop listening to them in turn. In an economy of excess, the advertising industry meets this problem with more advertising. The vendors' cries grow louder and it becomes more difficult to withdraw. We are faced with questions of hospitality: How much should we allow to access our minds? Where is the point of rupture? Christian H nggi holds an MSc in Communication Sciences from the University of Lugano and a PhD in Media and Communication from the European Graduate School. He is a branding expert and copywriter based in Zurich, Switzerland.</p>

Hospitality in the Age of Media Representation

Christian Hänggi

Digital technology dominates our hyper-mediated culture, and some evangelists are arguing that in only a few decades it will completely surpass human abilities in power. But will computers be able to replicate and transcend every aspect of human intelligence? In particular, will computers really emulate the artistic urge, and create original works of their own? Can Computers Create Art? turns the argument on its head. Looking at the philosophical underpinnings of computer technology, Morris contrasts these to theories of creativity, with particular reference to 20th century trends towards abstraction and media spectacle. In a wide-ranging analysis bringing together computer science, art theory, philosophy of the subject and neuroscience, Can Computers Create Art? uncovers the assumptions behind digital technology, and how it exemplifies the metaphysics of Western culture. James Morris is a lecturer in media theory at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Kent, England. In a previous life, he spent five years as editor of the UK’s number one-selling monthly computer magazine.

Can Computers Create Art?

MORRIS, JAMES

In the face of increasing critique of Modernity’s founding principles, concepts like truth, the autonomous and self grounded subject, morals or solvability of conflicts have become sites of contestation and debate. This book ventures to re-think some of those categories being debated in (post)modernity by invoking transpersonal and transrational transpositions. Asking about the continued possibilities for subjectivation, it inquires how an active, experiential practice of self-transformation could concretely be lived. Norbert Koppensteiner sketches the outlines of an art of living for a subjectivity perceived as constantly emergent and in transformation, a subjectivity that dares to embrace conflict as part of its transpersonal relational becoming and that emerges through an ongoing transformation of the self understood as an aesthetic (Apollonian) and energetic (Dionysian) practice. Norbert Koppensteiner is the Program Coordinator at the MA Program for Peace Studies and Research and Publications Coordinator at the UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria.

The Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice

Koppensteiner, Norbert

Tony See argues that the notion of a community without identity is derivable from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In doing so Tony See presents an original interpretation of Heidegger in which he was neither a mere Nazi follower nor an "apolitical" philosopher who was solely concerned with ontological questioning. Drawing upon Heidegger's early writings such as Being and Time, and his later writings such as Identity and Difference, See argues that Heidegger was working towards an idea of community which does not reduce the difference of the other into an identity.Tony See is currently a lecturer of International Studies at Monash University, Sunway Campus, Malaysia, and has been teaching at universities in Singapore and Shanghai.

Community Without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger

See, Tony

In Sonic Soma Elise Kermani traces the history of mankind from the origins of society and language to the present, and un-mutes the silence that resulted from forgetting, or refusing to hear, our own mythology 'right-side-up'. SonicSoma reunites the system of 'vibration/matter', 'sound/medium', and the double helix form of 'mind/body' which was split at the moment man began to write his history instead of listening to her story.Composer and multimedia artist Elise Kermani is the Director of IshtarLab Recordings, a publisher of experimental sound art, and the President of MiShinnah Productions, a non-profit organization that produces non-commercial film, music and visual art. She lives and works in New York City and also spends quality time thinking and writing at her home in Delmar, in upstate New York.

Sonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet

Kermani, Elise

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