Moving Images Mobile Viewers

Vision and movement seem to have shifted center stage in modes of experience in the last century: as a result of their joint effect, slow contemplative gazes at static images seem to be increasingly displaced by distracted "vernacular" ways of seeing. Looking out of the window of a speeding car, receiving photographs of Earth from outer space, watching the flickering images of the TV screen, scrolling through a text, zooming in on a location in Google Earth, or sending images via mobile phones or webcams - all these are unique visual experiences that were impossible before various inventions in the 20th century originated completely new kinds of movement. The double meaning of "moving images" is meant to signal the specificality of motion to these imagi(ni)ngs and, at the same time, to express the emotional power of those visual images which are able to transcend the constant stream of images in contemporary perception. (Series: Kultur und Technik. Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Zentrums fur Kultur- und Technikforschung der Universitat Stuttgart - Vol. 20)

The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (which asks for a “poetics”), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the contributions here is their focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual arts, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues including the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; the body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; and the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader with a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the body–image relationship, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.

This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.

'European Cinema in Crisis' examines the conflicting terminologies that have dominated the discussion of the future of European film-making. It takes a fresh look at the ideological agendas, from 'avante-garde cinema' to the high/low culture debate and the fate of popular European cinema.

It has become commonplace to associate art and aesthetic experience with the category of ambiguity. Indeed, when we talk about art, we cannot do without the dynamic force of ambiguity just as the aesthetic itself cannot do without it. The great efforts to disambiguate aesthetic practices and their associated theories and contexts would eliminate art's unique ability to reshape our knowledge of the world, our sensory encounters with it, and our moral or political positions in it. The essays collected in this volume present different perspectives on this central category and develop interdisciplinary connections. Contributors include Frauke Berndt, Joy H. Calico, Stephan Kammer, Lutz Koepnick, Verena Krieger, Richard Langston, Rachel Mader, Lily Tonger-Erk, Gabriel Trop, and Thomas Wortmann.

This book is about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary artists’ moving image installations, and the ways that they use temporal and spatial relationships in the gallery to connect with geopolitical issues. Displaced from the cinema, moving images increasingly address themes of movement and change in the world today. Digital technology has facilitated an explosion of work of this kind, and the expansion of contemporary art museums, biennales and large-scale exhibitions all over the world has created venues and audiences for it. Despite its 20th century precursors, this is a new and distinct artistic form, with an emerging body of thematic concerns and aesthetics strategies. Through detailed analysis of a range of important 21st century works, the book explores how this spatio-temporal form has been used to address major issues of our time, including post-colonialism, migration and conflict. Paying close attention to the ways in which moving images interact with the specific spaces and sites of exhibition, the book explores the mobile viewer’s experiences in these immersive and transitory works.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. It situates artists’ moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists’ remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists’ film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists’ moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the ‘echo-chamber’, documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

Lesbian Web Series narrate female-centred stories, strengthen identity construction, and generate transnational communities beyond cultural barriers. Julia Obermayr explores the first definition of a new format, the first representations of lesbian women in US-American, Canadian, and Spanish web series from 2007 and onward, as well as their reciprocal effects regarding identity construction and community building of their transnational, mainly female, audience. The analyzed corpus comprises scenes taken from Venice the Series (2009) and its backstory »Otalia« on the soap opera Guiding Light (1952-2009), Seeking Simone (2009), Out With Dad (2010), Féminin/ Féminin (2014), Chica Busca Chica (2007) and its cinematic sequel De Chica En Chica (2015), as well as Notas Aparte (2016).