Oliver Grau, Thomas Veigl (Hrsg.): Imagery in the 21st century Reviewed by: Trebor Scholz, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts (NY)
As a ten year-old, passing by the Forbidden City of the East German Head of State and his functionaries sparked my imagination. The walled complex, tucked away in a forested area near Berlin, was guarded by an armed division of the Stasi. Back then, you couldn't Google for images of this residential compound; Pinterest, Google Earth, and civilian drones were not around. And even if they were available, there was no grassroots way of mass-reproducing images or texts. Images invade our consciousness. They can bear witness when words are used up. They can mobilize, gratify and inform. They can be put to work as evidence, argument, accusation, and proof. Images can help us to make sense of our surroundings. We surrender to the onslaught of images; sometimes the anti-punctum: senseless, lackadaisically composed, and extraneous. But images also fail us: the desensitizing overabundance of visual material does not stop all the atrocities depicted. Visuality in the early decades of the 21st century is not merely about image manipulation software though, it is about entirely new attitudes toward visuality. In the early years of the 21st century, the collection of essays Imagery in the 21st Century, edited by Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigl sets out to understand what will constitute an image, and what are novel ways to generate, project, and distribute pictures. http://arthist.net/reviews/3274# _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
