[-empyre-] A Post-Futurist or a Neo-Baroque perception?

Timothy Murray tcm1 at cornell.edu
Mon May 11 14:30:53 EST 2009


>Stamatia,

I am intrigued by your references to the Baroque or Post-Baroque.  In 
my new book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds 
(Minnesota), I place renewed consideration of the Baroque in the 
context of theorizing new media, particularly in relation to its 
inscription in and, I think, resistance of the mechanics of 
cinematically grounded projection and the derivatives of Euclidean 
geometry (with hints of chronology and metrics).  My primary thesis 
in the book is that new media provides the opportunity for a 
conceptual shift from linear visual projection to non-linear temporal 
folds of the kind you seem to describe in relation to affect or that 
Ashley tonight references in terms of the Kentridge installation.  Of 
course, this argument is very much in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze's 
work on the fold in Leibniz and, most particularly, with his emphasis 
on coexistent positions/postures that may not necessarily share the 
same world or point of view.  But the theoretical background need not 
be appreciated for us to understand how techno innovations in 
movement and motion solicit a rethinking of spatialization and shared 
perception.

One of the fruits of this week's initial discussion of critical 
motion practice has been its evocation of critical and temporal 
events whose interrelations, touchings, and brushings excede, 
compound, or confuse the rationalizations of systems and their visual 
projections.  As Ashley suggests in her account of Kentridge, this 
does not mean that projection vanishes, but that the overlappings in 
space and time of digital coordinates and technobodies extends the 
paramaters of the artistic "strain," as delimited by the screens of 
projection and its histories.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this fascinating and 
intense conversation progresses throughout the month.

Best,

Tim



>As someone who really enjoys working with concepts, I like to take 
>writings, practical works, historical eras and manifestos as places 
>where interesting critical and theoretical discussions potentially 
>linger. Post-futurism for me is a concept, in the same way Baroque 
>(' and Post-Baroque') are. In fact, if we consider things just at 
>their 'significational', or 'representational' value, even the old 
>Futurist manifesto could have been dismissed as already 
>outfashioned, (in the same way as all proclamations about art and 
>its more or less democratic meaning can be). But if we judge things 
>in this way, we might miss the possibility to discuss some of the 
>most interesting cultural, aesthetic, political ideas suggested to 
>us..
>

-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853


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