403 research outputs found
The Elastic Screen: Cinema and the Modern Imaginary of the Skin
No full textThe essay explores the cultural imaginary of tattoos as a prototype of the moving image, and connects it to an archeology of cinema as a form of embodiment
Circondati dalle immagini
No full textThe essay revists Robertson's phantasmagoria as an archeology of contemporary media, foregrounding the re-emergence of this late eighteenth-century ghost-machine in contemporary virtual and digital technologies, as well as in the media art projects of artists as diverse as Zoe Beloff, Tony Oursler or Alejandro Inarritu
Il corpo delle meraviglie: l'isteria e i fantasmi della sensibilità
No full textIl saggio è dedicato all’insorgere, fra Settecento e Ottocento, di un modello neurologico e meccanicistico dell’isteria, che da un lato risponde alla volontà di radicare la malattia nelle disfunzioni dell’organismo, e dall’altro sospinge medicina e scienza verso ipotesi occulte e magico-esoteriche, convertendo l’isteria in un fenomeno medianico. Negli stessi anni in cui Freud lavora sui sintomi isterici, esplode in Europa un singolare intreccio fra medici, ipnotizzatori e medium, che attira gli ambienti intellettuali trasformando il corpo isterico nell’emblema di una nuova estetica (Rodin, Rilke, Duchamp), e nel prototipo di un’opera d’arte che crea imitando le forme della malattia (Benjamin)
‘Il corpo incantato’. Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of ‘unconscious cerebration’
No full textThe essay explores the notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’ elaborated by British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in the first half of the nineteenth century, foregrounding its hybrid genealogy and its afterlife in both science and magic, as well as its transnational impact on the arts and psychology as an already available alternative to the Freudian unconscious. Carpenter’s idea of a corporeal unconscious is traced to the intersections of (occult) science, literature and visual culture, but also comparatively as it rippled off into European, American and Russian cultures, offering a shared notion of a bodily, physiological nonconscious that the Freudian tradition in psychoanalysis has long eclipsed and obscured. Italian Futurism is taken as a test case of the rich, and still underexplored, potentials of Carpenter’s intuition for an archeology both of ‘the unconscious’ and of contemporary returns in the humanities to materiality and embodiment
Rovistando nella discarica del tempo. Attorno allo spirito dei giocattoli tra Walter Benjamin e Joseph Cornell
No full textGlass, Mixed Media, Stone: the Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation
No full textThe essay takes ‘bodies of stone’ in its actual, literal sense, discussing nineteenth-century embalming techniques which involved a material transformation of human remains into glass, mixed media or stone. These processes of vitrifij ication or petrifij ication provided, on the one hand, auto-icons of the dead that seemed to rival the chemical immortality offfered by the emergent media, such as photography or fijilm. On the other hand, by mimicking natural processes of fossilisation, bodies of glass or stone were infused with vitalist notions of matter, hinting at states of suspended animation and latent life. The essay explores this ‘biochemical constellation of immortality’ through some peculiar nineteenth-century examples and traces the uncanny survival of these living corpses in today’s pop cultural imaginary
Il corpo nell'immaginario letterario
No full textThe book explores the social, political and cultural imaginary of the body in literary and aesthetic artifacts from the Renaissance to the present
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