The introduction of new media has recurrently produced fierce arguments and fears about the futur... more The introduction of new media has recurrently produced fierce arguments and fears about the future of attention, our ability to attend to meanings, objects, and ideas with care and persistence. In his essay, Koepnick revisits past and present debates about the relation of audiobooks and paper-based texts in order to argue for the need to move beyond worn concepts of aesthetic attentiveness. In Koepnick’s perspective, the mobile listening of audiobooks as much as the roaming passage through contemporary sound installations offer compelling test cases to rethink the very logic that makes us discuss (and often misunderstand) new technologies with old arguments. As it (re)introduces the category of resonance to cognitively centered understandings of reading, Koepnick’s essay explores the pleasures of half-attentive receptivity as a springboard to develop expanded attitudes about attention and aesthetic experience that meet the realities of a world saturated with information technology.
Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to... more Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to our desire to outspeed the accelerating transmission of information in the digital age. This article explores how different techniques of accelerated text dissemination and reading, such as consonant writing, speed-reading apps, and the PDF file format, borrow from the language of compression yet, precisely in so doing, obscure the constitutive multilayered temporality of reading and the embodied role of the reader. While discussing different methods aspiring to compress textual objects and processes of reading, the author illuminates hidden assumptions that accompany the rhetoric of text compression and compressed reading.
The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, re... more The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured b...
... to the logic of the star system and the popular's practices of textual poaching. ... ear... more ... to the logic of the star system and the popular's practices of textual poaching. ... earlier film's juxtaposition of high and low, of authentic expressiveness and commodified cultural practice. ... He is currently working on two different book projects, The Spiral Staircase: German Cinema ...
Chapter 2: explores probing of the durational, and the promise of wondrous interruption of time, ... more Chapter 2: explores probing of the durational, and the promise of wondrous interruption of time, in the photographic work and installativepractive of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Philip Lachenmann; though neither work lives up to classical defintions of the long take, both indicate the neeed to expand that concepts beyond traditional understandings of “cinema.”
The mid-1980s saw the emergence of what Andrew Higson has called the British heritage ‹lm, a cycl... more The mid-1980s saw the emergence of what Andrew Higson has called the British heritage ‹lm, a cycle of period pieces whose central pleasures lay in “the artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of the national past.”1 As de‹ned by Higson, the heritage ‹lm avoided the stylistic signatures of the European art ‹lm yet often explored literary sources and domestic cultural traditions as marks of authenticity. Heritage ‹lms privileged mise-en-scène over narrative development, ›uid camera moves over fast cutting, self-conscious panorama shots over close-ups. Concerned with character, place, and atmospheric detail rather than goal-oriented action, the British heritage ‹lms of the 1980s reproduced English history as a museal object of identi‹cation, consumption, and exportability. In the United States, these ‹lms—e.g., Another Country (1984), A Room with a View (1985), A Passage to India (1985), and Little Dorrit (1987)—were shown primarily in art house theaters. In ...
The introduction of new media has recurrently produced fierce arguments and fears about the futur... more The introduction of new media has recurrently produced fierce arguments and fears about the future of attention, our ability to attend to meanings, objects, and ideas with care and persistence. In his essay, Koepnick revisits past and present debates about the relation of audiobooks and paper-based texts in order to argue for the need to move beyond worn concepts of aesthetic attentiveness. In Koepnick’s perspective, the mobile listening of audiobooks as much as the roaming passage through contemporary sound installations offer compelling test cases to rethink the very logic that makes us discuss (and often misunderstand) new technologies with old arguments. As it (re)introduces the category of resonance to cognitively centered understandings of reading, Koepnick’s essay explores the pleasures of half-attentive receptivity as a springboard to develop expanded attitudes about attention and aesthetic experience that meet the realities of a world saturated with information technology.
Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to... more Compression is often considered a royal road to process data in ever-shorter time and to cater to our desire to outspeed the accelerating transmission of information in the digital age. This article explores how different techniques of accelerated text dissemination and reading, such as consonant writing, speed-reading apps, and the PDF file format, borrow from the language of compression yet, precisely in so doing, obscure the constitutive multilayered temporality of reading and the embodied role of the reader. While discussing different methods aspiring to compress textual objects and processes of reading, the author illuminates hidden assumptions that accompany the rhetoric of text compression and compressed reading.
The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, re... more The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured b...
... to the logic of the star system and the popular's practices of textual poaching. ... ear... more ... to the logic of the star system and the popular's practices of textual poaching. ... earlier film's juxtaposition of high and low, of authentic expressiveness and commodified cultural practice. ... He is currently working on two different book projects, The Spiral Staircase: German Cinema ...
Chapter 2: explores probing of the durational, and the promise of wondrous interruption of time, ... more Chapter 2: explores probing of the durational, and the promise of wondrous interruption of time, in the photographic work and installativepractive of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Philip Lachenmann; though neither work lives up to classical defintions of the long take, both indicate the neeed to expand that concepts beyond traditional understandings of “cinema.”
The mid-1980s saw the emergence of what Andrew Higson has called the British heritage ‹lm, a cycl... more The mid-1980s saw the emergence of what Andrew Higson has called the British heritage ‹lm, a cycle of period pieces whose central pleasures lay in “the artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of the national past.”1 As de‹ned by Higson, the heritage ‹lm avoided the stylistic signatures of the European art ‹lm yet often explored literary sources and domestic cultural traditions as marks of authenticity. Heritage ‹lms privileged mise-en-scène over narrative development, ›uid camera moves over fast cutting, self-conscious panorama shots over close-ups. Concerned with character, place, and atmospheric detail rather than goal-oriented action, the British heritage ‹lms of the 1980s reproduced English history as a museal object of identi‹cation, consumption, and exportability. In the United States, these ‹lms—e.g., Another Country (1984), A Room with a View (1985), A Passage to India (1985), and Little Dorrit (1987)—were shown primarily in art house theaters. In ...
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