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Humanities

The Dance of All Things
The Dance of All Things

Georges Didi-Huberman, Laurent Mannoni, ...

Movements of Air

It would be futile to resist the feeling that the marvelous curls of smoke, photographed by Étienne-Jules Marey between 1899 and 1901, first elicit from us. We have the impression of witnessing a pure beauty in the process of making, unmaking, and remaking itself incessantly before our eyes. It is a supreme flow—images of flow and a flow of images all at once—from which approximately fifty instants have been randomly “drawn,” all formed differently and likewise admirable. Such simple beauty...
  • artistic research
  • photography
  • History of photography
  • history of media
  • history of science
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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  • linguistics
  • utopia
  • semiotics and semiology
  • science fiction
  • communication
  • communication media

 

Topics
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • idleness
    • experiment
    • epistemology
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • poetology of knowledge
    • astonishment
    • poetics
    • history of knowledge
    • literary studies
    • potentiality
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • chromatics / colour science
    • color
    • semiotics and semiology
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • Theory of fiction
    • autobiography
    • autofiction
    • fiction
    • memory
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • mirror
    • gaze
    • optical illusion
    • observer
Current Texts
Blood!

Ines Kleesattel

Blood!

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  • feminism
  • gender
  • subjectification
  • painting
  • body
  • art history
  • gaze

 

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...
  • History of photography
  • film
  • media theory
  • photography
  • Siegfried Kracauer