First Set of Precarious Aesthetics Papers Online
The first batch of papers from the 2015 Precarious Aesthetics Conference is now online! You can read excerpts from the paper below and also click the paper titles to read the full text of the documents! Featured papers are by Arild Fetveit, Matt Applegate, Emilie Vergé, and James Hansen.
Introduction to the Conference by Arild Fetveit
A certain curiosity has brought us together here. A curiosity articulated by Wittgenstein in the form of the question: Is it ... always an advantage to replace an unsharp picture by a sharp one? Isn't the unsharp one often exactly what we need (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71)? I imagine the actuality of this question to be there as long as humans use and engage with images. Does the question have pertinence today? I think so...
Glîtchéd in †ranslation by Matt Applegate
In 2006, Marino theorized CCS as a sub-discipline of (DH, software studies,
media archaeology, etc.) with reference, and in some instances by contrast, to an aesthetics of code made manifest by figures like John Cayley and Mez Breeze. In his article, simply titled “Critical Code Studies,” Marino is concerned with the functionality and efficiency of code, an aesthetic problem on his view, but he is also concerned with how code manifests as an aesthetic object...
Decomposition as Composition: Analog Experimental Film and the Physico-Chemical Processes by Emilie Vergé
As early as 1950, Jean Isidore Isou in his avant-garde film Venom and Eternity, claims: “I think that my film will contribute firstly a new technique of the image, chiseled or rotten photography.” He explains: “Remember the Marquis de Sade's relations with women. The divine Marquis knew so many dames! In his search for the unknown, he reached a special kind of love known as perversion. The more the woman was ugly, toothless and disgusting the more she excited him and pleased him in love...
Blurry Ghosts: Luther Price and the Slide Projector by James Hansen
A slide projector sits alone in the center of a room. It rests on an elevated stand, beaming a strange 35mm slide onto a white wall. A series of sprocket holes cross horizontally along the top edge of the frame: three sprockets at the top left and another two at the top right. In the center, a strip rips vertically down the frame, violently separating the left and right sections. However, there are two more sprocket holes at the bottom center of the frame...