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Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer
Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer, Philippe Despoix (ed.), ...

The Past's Threshold

There can be no doubt, however, that in Kracauer’s texts published at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s from his position as an editor of the cultural pages at the daily newspaper Frankfurter ­Zeitung, then in the 1950s during his American period, he sketches out a theorisation of photography that can be described as groundbreaking. But it is also true that most of his works overlap, in more than one way, with this medium of reproduction or that...
  • media theory
  • photography
  • History of photography
  • Siegfried Kracauer
  • film
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • utopia
  • semiotics and semiology
  • science fiction
  • communication
  • communication media
  • linguistics

 

Anthology

Tanz mit den Daten

Philipp Fischer, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Christoph Hoffmann, Hans Hofmann, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Hannes Rickli

Datennaturen

Topics
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • monochrome
    • image and imagery
    • color
    • chromatics / colour science
    • semiotics and semiology
  • THINK ART? THINK ART!
  • Choreographing multitudes

    Choreographing multitudes

    • swarm model
    • social movements
    • protest movements
    • crowd
    • social networks
    • crowd psychology
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • economy
    • economization
    • economics
    • financial crisis
    • financial markets
    • discourse history
Current Texts

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

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  • queer theory
  • gender
  • identity
  • performativity
  • migration

 

Questioning the United Fruit Company archive
 Questioning the United Fruit Company archive

Liliana Gómez

Archive Matter

The United Fruit Company archive is the point of departure for this book’s reflections about the constructions but also the contested meanings of photography and thus about how the camera both depicts and configures the Caribbean as a laboratory of the modern. As archives emerge, they are resurgent, may change over the course of time, mold space anew, or revise history. By their nature archives are Pandora’s box, the outcome of opening them necessarily unknown, bringing the possibility of detournements....
  • archive
  • photography
  • cultural studies
  • Caribbean
  • capitalism
Current Texts
Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • realism
  • postmodernism
  • transhumanism
  • art theory
  • re-enactment
  • artistic practice