Coffee, Nicotine Gum, and David Graeber

Jean-Luc Godard, Masculin, féminin (1966)

I woke this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox announcing an upcoming lecture at SVA’s Art Criticism Program by David Graeber with the description:

DAVID GRAEBER, On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time

The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all.

—

The name sounding more than vaguely familiar and the topic sounding more than vaguely interesting, I put the coffee on popped a nicotine gum and got to work (re)discovering the work of this (sometimes labeled) radical scholar. 

Melancholy, Down, and Historicity

Paul Klee - Angelus Novus/Angel of History (1920)

Albrecht Dürer Melancolia I (1514)

Thinking today about the treatment of Durer’s Melancolia I engraving and Paul Klee’s etching Angelus Novus in Giorgio Agamben’s “The Melancholy Angel” (from The Man Without Content) I ended up running into and remarking upon the somewhat slippery, ill-defined and shifty temporal qualities of melancholy.

Retromediation Revisited, Material and Film Aesthetics, and Tacita Dean

So, I kinda-sorta ended up trying to answer my own question that I suggested a few weeks ago regarding the possibility of there being something I called ‘retromediation.’

I ended up defining retromediation as the intentional return to an earlier or old(er) form of media for the very material qualities of production that such a medium possesses. 

In so doing I hit upon the work of Tacita Dean who happens to have been the latest artists to be invited to install her work in the grand Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern here in London. While the physical jump from my classroom door to the work of Tacita Dean was only a few feet, I’m hoping that the conceptual one I took was a little bit greater. If a muddled academic mix of media and art theory with a healthy dose of neologisms are your thing then please read on. 

Werq I did in Tokyo in 2011

(Source: the-hepstar.com)

If Remediation ‘is the imitation of features of a previous medium by a subsequent one,’ is there such a thing as retromediation.

~If so what form does it take?

photomanipulation via glitchnews

Shanghai 2010

Desperately Thinking Coldness

soulpowwerrz:

Aurora australis (Southern Light) over icebergs (by zacharycellis)

(via riceboyholmes)

Counterfactual History and Speculative Futures →

The Golden Institute, by Sascha Pohflepp, not only explores the energy issue through the lens of an alternate history of the USA, but also attempts to examine how visions of the future are being created and how they can make us reflect on contemporary issues.

(via she-lovestherevolution)

Digital Nostalgia

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (2002)

I find it particularly intriguing that artists who choose to confront the role of technology in society (either as a subject or as a medium) often take a retrogressive stance. This type of work  predominantly takes two forms: repurposing (to make something new out of old) or retro/nostalgia (to look towards the past from the present).

On the one hand, work that repurposes older technologies to make them appear new or to arrive at new functionality exists. These include artists working from an environmental perspective, working with circuit bending, game hacking, and creating digital/analog hybrids. Such works serve as a bridge linking our past with our technological present. These formats also comment on the rapid obsolescence of technologies.