Aesthetics Digital Studies And Bernard Stiegler

Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler frames the intertwined relationship between artistic endeavours and scientific fields and their sociopolitical implications. Each chapter is either an explication of, or a critique of, some aspect of Bernard Stiegler's technological philosophy; as it is his technological-political-aesthetical-ethical theorisations which form the philosophical foundation of the volume. Emerging scholars bring critical new reflections to the subject area, while more established academics, researchers and practitioners outline the mutating nature of aesthetics within historical and theoretical frameworks. Not only is interdisciplinarity a prevailing topic at work within this collection, but so too is there a delineation of the mutating, hybrid role inhabited by the arts practitioner – at once engineer, scientist and artist – in the changing landscape of digital cultural production.

This issue brings together three lectures on aesthetics delivered by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Los Angeles in 2011 with articles by scholars of Stiegler's work. Aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has been central to Stiegler's work since the mid-1990s. The lectures featured here explicitly link Stiegler's interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper as well as to art history. In "The Proletarianization of Sensibility," "Kant, Art, and Time," and "The Quarrel of the Amateurs," Stiegler expounds his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility, centering on how the figure of the amateur--who loves what he or she does--must be recovered from beneath the ruins of technical history. The other contributors engage the topics covered in the lectures, including the figure of the amateur, cinema, the digital, and extinction. Contributors. Stephen Barker, Ed Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Arne De Boever, Beno t Dillet, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. N. Hansen, Jason R. LaRivi re, Gerald Moore, Daniel Ross, Bernard Stiegler

This is the second volume of research into the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and its interconnections with the philosophy of education. Building on the first edited collection, Stiegler’s philosophy is introduced to scholars in the field of the philosophy of education in the hope that researchers dig deep into his philosophy and apply it to their own educational context in order to produce new forms of knowledge, that is “negentropic” forms of knowledge which may counter the endemic crises we see in educational institutions in towns, cities and villages across the planet. This second volume throws down the gauntlet to others to find new ways to contest toxic forms of digital life inside and outside education and to challenge entrenched and conservative ways of teaching and learning in the 21st century. The writers in this volume from Australasia, Europe, and across South, Southeast and East Asia do a remarkable job of translating Bernard Stiegler’s sometimes complicated language into ways which are interpretable, applicable and communicable to those who witness, day in day out, in their schools, universities and institutions the struggle to capture the hearts and minds of young people. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

In this comprehensive and highly interdisciplinary companion, contributors reflect on remix across the broad spectrum of media and culture, with each chapter offering in-depth reflections on the relationship between remix studies and the digital humanities. The anthology is organized into sections that explore remix studies and digital humanities in relation to topics such as archives, artificial intelligence, cinema, epistemology, gaming, generative art, hacking, pedagogy, sound, and VR, among other subjects of study. Selected chapters focus on practice-based projects produced by artists, designers, remix studies scholars, and digital humanists. With this mix of practical and theoretical chapters, editors Navas, Gallagher, and burrough offer a tapestry of critical reflection on the contemporary cultural and political implications of remix studies and the digital humanities, functioning as an ideal reference manual to these evolving areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of digital humanities, remix studies, media arts, information studies, interactive arts and technology, and digital media studies.

In this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age. Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a ‘symbolic misery’ where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today’s control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. That part of the population that continues to experiment aesthetically has turned its back on those who live in the misery of this conditioning. Stiegler appeals to the art world to develop a political understanding of its role. In this volume he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory. This highly original work - the first in Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery series - will be of particular interest to students in film studies, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy and will consolidate Stiegler’s reputation as one of the most original cultural theorists of our time.

Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.

Shortlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 This book uses digital media theory to explore contemporary understandings of expanded scenography as spatial practice. It surveys and analyses a selection of ground-breaking, experimental digital media performances that comprise a genealogy spanning the last 30 years, in order to show how the arrival of digital technologies have profoundly transformed performance practice. Performances are selected based on their ability to elicit the unique specificities of digital media in new and original ways, thereby exposing both the richness and shortcomings of digital culture. O'Dwyer argues that contemporary scenography is largely propelled by and dependent on digital technologies and represents a rich, fertile domain, where unbridled creativity can explore new techniques and challenge the limits of knowledge. The 30-year genealogy includes works by Troika Ranch, Stelarc, Klaus Obermaier, Chunky Moves, Onion Lab and Blast Theory. In addition to applying a broad scope of performance analysis and aesthetic theory, the work includes artists' interviews and opinions. The volume opens important aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political themes in order to highlight the impact of digital technologies on scenographic practice and the blossoming of experimental interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, the book is an exploration of how evolutionary leaps in technology contribute to how humans think, act, make work, engage one another, and therefore construct meaning and identity.

In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end "banality" of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.