Archives of Experience: Toward a Digital Aesthetics
It slips away; for it was not a thing but an urge to movement.
-Henri Bergson
My doctoral dissertation, Archives of Experience: Toward a Digital Aesthetics, argues a materialist and philosophical genealogy of movement for contemporary media aesthetics. By movement I mean a phenomenal description, not a metaphor: an actual pulse of intimate, vital life, whose energy lights up the utopian histories and present-tense affects of an auratic aesthetics of movement.
As an archaeology of the intermedial tradition—or a history of that domain of material culture Michel Foucault called the 'audiovisual archive'—my project places lived experience at the center of its stakes to trace a line of aesthetics and politics through three dominant historical configurations of media: in the dialectical relation of analog and digital case studies, and by exchanges and transactions between the visible, the poetically articulable, and the figural in photography, cinema, and digitality.
…and the line draws you on. You can think only on this magical line.
-Gilles Deleuze
This analysis is grounded in the re-ordering of an ontological scene: in an attempt to historicize Henri Bergson's philosophy of movement against the early Lumière cinema most contemporary to his thought.
Following this evaluation of some implications of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books, my project traces an analytic history of digital aesthetics by locating the status of the virtual in a longue durée phenomenological tradition, and by finding a priori expressions of digital materiality in a sequence of interrelating movements, set-ups, and spectatorial dispositifs.
That is, in the Lumière films as a cinema of attractions; and in the luminous, expanded cinema installations of Anthony McCall—
In the experiential, open-form poetics of Frank O'Hara and the media poetry of Hollis Frampton;
The innovations of contemporary science film and the uncanny affects of second generation 4D animation;
In the acutely critical artistic interventions of Ken Jacobs, the quantitative atmospherics of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, the collaborative polemics of the polymorphic Raqs Media Collective;
—and in the aesthetics of transition illuminated by the materialist poïesis of Tacita Dean and the dialogic historiography of Mark Lewis.
Committee: Mark B.N. Hansen, Lauren Berlant, Tom Gunning.
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image: Étienne-Jules Marey, Flight of a Crow (1894) chronophotograph of the trajectory traced by a crow's wings in flight
Nothing is more secret, nothing is more lyrical, nothing is more explosive, nothing is more modern than the silence of his blacks and the lightness of his whites.
-Henri Langlois