Vertov Snow Farocki

Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman begins with a comprehensive and original anthropological analysis of Vertov's film The Man With a Movie Camera. Tomas then explores the film's various aspects and contributions to media history and practice through detailed discussions of selected case studies. The first concerns the way Snow's La Région Centrale and De La extend and/or develops important theoretical and technical aspects of Vertov's original film, in particular those aspects that have made the film so important in the history of cinema. The linkage between Vertov's film and the works discussed in the case studies will also serve to illustrate the historical and theoretical significance of a comparative approach of this kind, and illustrate the pertinence of adopting a 'relational approach' to the history of media and its contemporary practice, an approach that is no longer focused exclusively on the technical question of the new in contemporary media practices but, in contrast, situates a work and measures its originality in historical, intermedia, and ultimately political terms.

Screen-based media, such as touch-screens, navigation systems and virtual reality applications merge images and operations. They turn viewing first and foremost into using and reflect the turn towards an active role of the image in guiding a user’s action and perception. From professional environments to everyday life multiple configurations of screens organise working routines, structure interaction, and situate users in space both within and beyond the boundaries of the screen. This volume examines the linking of screen, space, and operation in fields such as remote navigation, architecture, medicine, interface design, and film production asking how the interaction with and through screens structures their users’ action and perception.

Variable Conditions recovers and explores early Canadian encounters between computational media and contemporary art in the late twentieth century, charting a network of developments linking meteorology, computation, and the arts that arose long before the age of cloud computing. Essays uncover the material conditions that shaped the emergence of computational arts in Canada, from projects executed by mainframe to digital paintings and analog synthesizer performances. A surprising number of institutional circumstances granted access to early computer hardware – government nuclear and hydroelectric infrastructure, agencies as diverse as the National Film Board and the National Research Council, and a myriad of university settings across the country – and creative conditions varied from benign administrative neglect to the artistic exploration of randomness or a distinct emphasis on thematizing transformation as a motor for graphic visualization and auditory exploration. Interviews featuring leading artists give first-hand insight into artistic practices and the historical moment in which they occurred. The book provides valuable new perspectives on computer art pioneers such as Leslie Mezei, Robert Adrian X, Suzanne Duquet, Roger Vilder, and Vera Frenkel, as well as new contexts for understanding Michael Snow and IAIN BAXTER&. Not limiting their explorations to art generated using computers, contributors outline the integration of computational techniques and concepts into artistic methods across disciplines and trace computation’s emergence as a matter of interest and concern for a range of contemporary cultural producers. Combining historical analyses with theoretical approaches to computation and its entanglement with contemporary cultural discourses and social movements, Variable Conditions excavates the origins of computational arts and, in the process, sketches a new landscape of interdisciplinary creation and surprising connections between scientific and artistic institutions.

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods. “Machine art” is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works by avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s. An art historical perspective, he argues, might change our views of recent works that seem to be driven by new media technologies but that in fact continue a century-old artistic exploration. Broeckmann investigates critical aspects of machine aesthetics that characterized machine art until the 1960s and then turns to specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy, looking in particular at the work of the Canadian artist David Rokeby; vision and image, and the advent of technical imaging; and the human body, using the work of the Australian artist Stelarc as an entry point to art that couples the machine to the body, mechanically or cybernetically. Finally, Broeckmann argues that systems thinking and ecology have brought about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology, which has brought with it a rethinking of human subjectivity. He examines a range of artworks, including those by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami, whose work exemplifies the shift.

Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinema verite, Dziga Vertov has exerted a decisive influence on directors from Eisenstein to Godard. Yet his reputation long rested upon a lone masterpiece, 'Man with a Movie Camera'. Recently, however Vertov has begun to be recognised as the creator of a body of innovative and distinct films and, as Jeremy Hicks argues, documentary as we know it today is unthinkable without the rediscovery of Vertov. This, the first book in English to cover the whole of Vertov's career, reveals him to be an auteur, allowing readers to combine the familiar and less familiar aspects of his filmmaking and thinking in a cohesive narrative. Jeremy Hicks demonstrates how Vertov draws on Soviet journalistic models for his transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. Through analyses of "Cine-Pravda No 21" (Leninist Cine-Pravda), "Cine-Eye", "Forward Soviet!", "A Sixth Part of the Earth", "The Eleventh Year", "Man with a Movie Camera", "Enthusiasm", "Three Songs of Lenin", and "Lullaby", he shows how Vertov's greatest works combine authentic documentary footage ingeniously for tremendous rhetorical effect. Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of "Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film".

"This book is a collection of little-known writings by and about Dziga Vertov. It follows the development of his work and opinions from 1917 to 1930, and chronicles contemporary reactions to them - from critics whose names are now forgotten, as well as such prominent personalities as fellow directors Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, artists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich, and theorists Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer." --Book Jacket.

Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his work—in both sound and silent forms—has given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.