aesthetics

Jacques Rancière - The Politics of Aesthetics

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum, 2004.
For Rancière, aesthetics means “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships”(10). It does not merely refer to… »

Aesthetic Conflicts in Psychoanalysis and (Novel) Education

Deborah P. Britzman, Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning
What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and education? Why does Britzman connect or arrange in parallel these two (or more) ways of presentation in terms of storytelling – whether novel or narration? Who narrates and who invites one to be a narrator? Why is the… »

Pierre Bourdieu - Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard UP, 1984.
My impression of Bourdieu’s Distinction is that his radical social theory of class differentiation does not leave any room for subjective position, focusing on the deepest objectification of the “nature of the game.” Thus for him, cultural capital, which was assumed to be derived… »

Elspeth Probyn - Outside Belongings

Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings, Routledge, 1996.
What is the ‘outside belongings’? What does Probyn try to describe with the notion? How do the ‘outside’ and the ‘belongings’ comes together and why? To begin with, instead of identity politics, Probyn defines her study of body and desire as the “sociology of the skin” (5) in which the… »

Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
It is not so usual to meet an author who engages himself in a single theme explaining everything about it even by focusing on its negative aspects. Among others, there is Nietzsche who spent his whole life in criticizing dominant culture of his era. In a sense, Debord’s fragmented… »

Anthony Giddens - The Transformation of Intimacy

Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society, Stanford UP, 1992.
It is an interesting idea that romantic love is a product of modernity – or, at least, was accompanied with the process of modernization. Giddens assumes that romantic love “began to make its presence felt from the late eighteenth century… »

W.J.T. Mitchell - What Do Pictures Want?

W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images” + “Showing Seeing” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, U of Chicago Press, 2005.
What Mitchell is trying to explain in “The Surplus Value of Images” is the nature of images – paradoxically under- and over-estimated – confused with pictures or works of art… »

Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2008.
What made the working class not only progressive in accepting new technological reproducibility of the artwork but also distracted or alienated from their lives by the same apparatus of mass production?… »

SIGGRAPH 2009 - Information Aesthetics

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Information Aesthetics: Call for Submissions
For over 35 years, the SIGGRAPH conference has been the premier venue for showcasing work in computer graphics and interactive techniques, and it has a long history of recognizing beauty in concert with technology. For SIGGRAPH 2009, the conference is developing Information Aesthetics: a new thematic area that recognizes the increasingly… »

[Exhibition] The Aesthetics of Gaming

Pace Digital Gallery presents an exhibition curated by Michelle Kasprzak (Scotland), The Aesthetics of Gaming.
The Aesthetics of Gaming
~Michelle Kasprzak
February 10 - March 3
Reception Feb 26, 5 - 7pm
(5:00 pm lecture by Joe McKay / 6:00pm reception)

images (L-R): screenshots from Joe McKay, Avoid, Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier CuteXdoom II; patterns used on this page from CuteXdoom II
At the… »