Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3: The Block of Fame

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Published: 01/14/2021

In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2: The Contest between B-Genres

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Published: 11/24/2020

In The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in[…]

Television Scales

Published: 10/02/2019

How to reckon with the staggering volume of television materials, past and present? And how to comprehend all the potential, complex scales at which to grapple with television, from its tiniest units of audiovisual content to its most massive industrial coordinates and beyond? In Television Scales, Nick Salvato demonstrates how the problem of scale in[…]

Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura

Published: 01/23/2019

Some photographers take pictures of cities that show no humans and the fact that none appear is somehow meaningful. But I have no interest in this kind of expression—the meaning that a desolate city suggests. I have no interest in photos that imply something. The possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off[…]

Fugitive Traces

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Published: 09/05/2016

Fugitive Traces is an album and accompanying PDF booklet that collages the director’s commentary from over a dozen Werner Herzog films with electronic, chamber, and rock music to both pay homage to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers and critique an artistic practice rooted in contradiction and frequent disaster. Fugutive Traces (album) You know[…]

Everyday Cinema: The Films of Marc Lafia

Published: 01/31/2017

Everyday Cinema presents the films (eight features and numerous shorts, computational, and installation films) of Marc Lafia. In his many films (including Exploding Oedipus; Love and Art; Confessions of an Image; Revolution of Everyday Life; Paradise; Hi, How Are You Guest 10497; and 27)  Lafia probes what it is to construct an image, to forge systems of representation, to[…]

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics: Desire, Affect, and Representation in Pornography

Published: 05/26/2016

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics asks whether, and how, it is possible to re-appropriate pornography and think through it critically and creatively for a project of liberation. In the different contributions which make up this deliberately heterogeneous collection of short, non-canonical essays, such a quest proceeds by re-articulating the aporias of desire, intimacy, touch and seduction. It also[…]