1994 research outputs found
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Not Yet:Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s <i>Mafrouza</i> Cycle
Get PDFMafrouza is a twelve-hour-long documentary by French director Emanuelle Demoris, shot in a now-demolished neighbourhood in Alexandria, Egypt. Demoris is one of a long chain of western filmmakers who appeal to some form of ‘taking one’s time’ as an instrument for — morally, politically, epistemologically — adequate representation. Based on the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Eduard Glissant, and Poor Theory, this chapter evaluates what happens when a film adopts a strategy of deferral in cases in which it is not clear how questions of ‘doing justice’ could be resolved. Using long duration and an insistence on the quotidian, Demoris’s film forces us to think about the conditions that make pronouncements about character, situation, and narrative possible, continuously postponing the moment when it will become possible to say: ‘this film is about …’. By setting itself up for failure, the film proposes one possible approach to the ethics and politics of visibility
Social Media and Leibniz’ Monadology Artificial Experience I
Get PDFThe Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media juxtaposes thought figures from the history of philosophy with concrete media-technical ensembles under the rubric ‘Artificial Experience’. More specifically, it studies the artificiality of human and non-human experience as media. The hypothesis is that historical philosophical figures offer different perspectives on traditional as well as current media-technical objects. Following Gilbert Simondon’s theory, the group also hopes to uncover specific modes of experience embedded in certain media-technical ensembles, modes which have remained hidden because the better thought figure has not yet been tested. This workshop will juxtapose Leibniz’s ‘monad’ — understood as an atomistic and highly perspectival account of experience — with current media technologies (for example, social media). The workshop is divided into two sessions. The first is a collaborative, in-depth reading of the Monadology and related texts and letters, asking questions such as: what forms of human and non-human experience can be observed there? Can this be understood as a mode of media or artificial experience? What roles do historical media play in Leibniz, the window, the mirror, the city, etc.? The second session will connect the figure of the monad with concrete media technologies proposed by participants themselves. What dimension of experience can be brought to light in the chosen media technology, if it is linked with Leibniz’s monadic thinking? Two further workshops organized by Martin Doll and Paul North on thought figures from Kant and Husserl will follow in 2023
‘The Reconstruction of the Past is the Task of Historians and not Agents’:Operative Reenactment in State Security Archives
Get PDFState security archives in Eastern Europe are shedding new light on the operative practices of the secret services and their interaction with performance art. Surveillance, tracking, undermining, disruption, writing of reports, and measure plans were different operative methods to be carried out in continuous repetitive processes. This paper argues that, through these repetitive working processes, state security agencies were permanently engaged in different forms of reenactments: of orders, legends, report writing, and inventing measure plans. With this operative reenactment, state security agencies not only tried to track down facts but also created ‘fake facts’ serving their agenda. These `fake-facts` were then again repeated and reenacted by informants endlessly to be `effective` in the surveillance and elimination of performance art
Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment:Revisiting Cavell’s Emerson
Get PDFThroughout his career, Stanley Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call ‘the near, the low, the common’. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson’s efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his ‘aversive thinking’: his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell’s Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell’s philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson’s engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways
Reenactment in Theatre:Some Reflections on the Philosophical Status of Restaging
Get PDFTheatre, because of its ability to represent through restaging, would seem to be the quintessential platform for reenactment. The Orestea (una commedia organica?) by R. Castelluci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, restaged at the Paris Automne Festival in 2015, twenty years after its 1995 world premiere in Prato, is the starting point for a reflection on the status of restaging in theatre. This case study is the occasion to apply Walter Benjamin’s philosophical concept of the Jetztzeit to a theatrical context, and to consider also the ‘citational’ value of theatrical reenactment. These concepts are useful to study not only the reenactment of theatrical gesture and acting but also to consider the practice of restaging related to the theatrical event conceived in its entirety
Performance Art in the 1990s and the Generation Gap
Get PDFIn the 1990s, the question of the legacy of historical performance was posed with a particular sense of urgency. In the context of most pioneers of the art form having retired from live performance, reenactments not only reproduced past works but positioned artists within the genealogy of performance. The sense of the passage of a generation and the transmission of the memory of past performances were made explicit by Marina Abramović in The Biography (1992), a theatre piece in which she stages the very process of accounting for her past, as well as by Takashi Murakami and Oleg Kulik, who emerged on the art scene in the 1990s and mimicked live works from the past
Living Simulacrum:The Neoplastic Room in Łódź: 1948 / 1960 / 1966 / 1983 / 2006 / 2008 / 2010 / 2011 / 2013 / 2017 / ∞
Get PDFThe Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the ‘International Collection of Modern Art’ by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of ‘re-curating’ the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska)
Resounding Difficult Histories
Get PDFPrompt, Immediate, Now / Very Restrained and Cautious (2013), Defending Territory in a Networked World (2013) and Afgang 04.00 (2017) are three sound pieces that lean on events of historical proportions. They involve addressing the artistic challenge of letting difficult historical narratives resonate in the present. The artistic process for all three works involved finding fitting modes of reenactment and providing a present-day position on why and how these materials may be incorporated in artworks today, as well as contributing to historical revision and political resistance