Search Results (4)

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions. Full article

In order to consider the materiality of Victor Grippo’s artwork Energía de una papa (1972) more comprehensively than has thus far been the case, the specific characteristics of this case study are initially discussed against the background of the relationship between materiality and conceptual art. In a further step, the artwork’s agency is questioned, and it is regarded in the context of positions within new materialism. This is done by utilizing certain aspects of Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism” in an examination of Grippo’s artwork. Our thesis is that while the Baradian approach is able to explain materiality within the functioning of the case study, the complex embedding of materiality and symbolic factors for the context of the art require an even broader perspective. Finally, the different layers of materiality—the material presence and the immaterial, less tangible aspects—are considered together in order to show their indispensable entanglement in generating the artwork’s meaning. It is not just the potato as food-as-art-material or the voltameter as a ready-made that must be our focus, but all the organic, non-human materials and the non-tangible elements involved in the artistic work, as well as the human being who sets the process in motion. Full article

During highly polarized times, issues are quickly addressed in ways that emphasize divisions. To support the healing of our polarized culture through art, new materialist theory as presented by Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti will be entangled with art and artmaking according to Dennis Atkinson and Makoto Fujimura to argue for art as an act of environmental and cultural stewardship, creating new possibilities and differences in the virtual that are merciful, graceful, and hopeful. To form this argument, first a summary of new materialism and ethics through Agential Realism and Affirmative Ethics is addressed. Next, a cartography including scientific and theological perspectives is presented for a diffractive reading regarding the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope to develop a new materialist understanding through a philosophy of immanence to counter the circular perpetuation of violence. These concepts are then individually addressed through the proposed new materialist framework to further break from material-discursive dualistic thought. This approach is then explored through various artworks to investigate the co-constructing material-discursive nature of art to create new relations and possibilities in the world. Finally, an in-depth study of the artworks Becoming Us by Megan Constance Altieri and Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael are addressed to detail how a new materialist approach to art that focuses on the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope can position art as an act of stewardship. Full article

This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the discussion with regard to picture making forward to more fully embrace the pictorial and the physical, the historical and institutional processes within apparatuses of picture-making. The attempt in ‘Ghost stories’ through the concept of a visual apparatus, is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad’s agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris’s (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk’s (2017) image operations; Mondzian’s (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war. Full article