The machine and the ghost

The machine and the ghost
Author: Sas Mays
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526112108

Focusing on our complex relationship with technology, The machine and the ghost explores our culture’s continued fascination with the spectral, the ghostly and the paranormal. Through a series of critical case studies and artists’ discussions, this lively new collection examines topics ranging from contemporary art to cultural theory. Produced with renowned specialists within the field, including the artist Susan Hiller and the writer Marina Warner, the book combines the historical with the contemporary in exploring how the visual culture of paranormal phenomena continues to haunt our imaginations. Informed by history and the visual tradition of spiritualism and psychical research, the collection is very much concerned to site that tradition within our contemporary concerns, such as landscape and environment, and recent technological developments. Aimed at a broad academic and cultural audience, the collection will appeal to all academic levels in addition to those interested in art and culture more widely.

The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction

The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction
Author: Vanessa Guignery
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 162273646X

The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within examine whether contemporary forms of literary fragmentation constitute a return to the modernist episteme or the fragmented literature of exhaustion of the 1960s, mark a continuity with postmodernist aesthetics or signal a deviation from past models and an attempt to reflect today’s accelerated culture of social media and over-communication. Contributors theorise and classify literary fragments, examine the relationship between fragmentation and the Zeitgeist (influenced by globalisation, media saturation and social networks), analyse the mechanics of multimodal and multimedial fictions, and consider the capacity of literary fragmentation to represent personal or collective trauma and to address ethical concerns. They also investigate the ways in which the architecture of the printed book is destabilised and how aesthetic processes involving fragmentation, bricolage and/or collage raise ontological, ethical and epistemological questions about the globalised contemporary world we live in and its relation to the self and the other. Besides the aforementioned authors, the volume makes reference to the works of J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Markson, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson and several others.

Sonic Warfare

Sonic Warfare
Author: Steve Goodman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2012-08-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0262517957

An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Hexen 2039

Hexen 2039
Author: Suzanne Treister
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Brodsky, Rosalind (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9781904772637

Rosalind Brodsky, the alter ego of artist Suzanne Treister, is a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality in the twenty-first century. HEXEN 2039 charts Brodsky's scientific research in the development of new mind control technologies through a series of drawings, diagrams and photographs. By turns baroque, challenging, comic, elegant, mysterious and intriguing, these works uncover or construct links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, and behaviour control experiments of the US Army and its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience. In addition, an essay by Richard Grayson examines Treister's practice in detail. As a whole, this fascinating and complex body of work questions the way we look at history and the future, science, technology, politics, and narrative. A rich and engaging book, HEXEN 2039 is part artist's monograph and part chilling premonition of the future, echoing the world of graphic novels and computer games. The book also includes a 62 x 53 cm poster.

Suzanne Treister

Suzanne Treister
Author: Suzanne Treister
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9781907317637

HEXEN2.0 is the sequel to HEXEN 2039 which imagined new technologies for psychological warfare through investigating links between the occult and the military in relation to histories of witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army's MKULTRA program and more recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of contemporary neuro-scientific research. HEXEN2.0 delves deeper into the histories of scientific research behind government programs of mass control, in tandem with counter-cultural and grass roots movements, and creates a space for the imagining of alternative future scenarios. HEXEN2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII US governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. Furthermore, HEXEN2.0 investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences1 (1943-1956) - whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind - alongside specific critics of technological society such as Theodore Kaczynski/Unabomber, current profiles of Anarcho-Primitivists and Post Leftists, and traces the precursory ideas of Thoreau, Heidegger, Adorno and others in relation to fantasies of utopic/dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film. Through representing and re-examining these subjects and histories through the lens of occult belief systems and ideas of the supernatural HEXEN2.0 takes us to a hypnotic, mesmerizing space of early technological fantasy and theory to hallucinate feedback from the past from where one may imagine and construct possible alternative futures. The information in HEXEN2.0 is based on actual events, people and histories.

Hexen 2.0 Tarot

Hexen 2.0 Tarot
Author: Suzanne Treister
Publisher:
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2015
Genre: Cartomacy
ISBN: 9781910433744

Blur of the Otherworldly

Blur of the Otherworldly
Author: Mark Alice Durant
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN:

"The Blur of the Otherworldly presents twenty-eight contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, radio, Internet, computers) to explore culturally inbred questions/superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own...The artists of Blur of the Otherworldly explore the vagaries of the shifting line between what we know from science and technology and what scuttles around the darker edges of the imagination"--Back cover.

AUDINT-Unsound:Undead

AUDINT-Unsound:Undead
Author: Steve Goodman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1916405215

Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena). For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present. This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present. The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead. Contributors Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.