Life after New Media

Kember, Sarah; Żylińska, Joanna

doi:10.7551/mitpress/8796.001.0001

Cited by 310 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…To this end, this essay shows and tells different possibilities of oil-in the way that Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska argue for media practice as critique (Kember and Zylinska 2012). In a broader context, the work aims for what science studies and critical race scholar Ruha Benjamin proposes: a third way of doing knowledge production that is not purely fact nor purely fiction because facts alone are not enough (Benjamin, n.d.).…”

Section: Oil Art Agential Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media

Vargas¹

2021

Media+Environment

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The seemingly prosaic question "What is oil?" opens up a mystifying world of new conceptual frameworks, ethics, and material circumstances. What does it mean to think with oil beyond the practices of representation that enact its contemporary form? Between 2015 and 2018, my ongoing critical and creative oil research led to a series of crude oil media artworks, which illuminate, materialize, and reexamine basic assumptions of oil. Thinking with the diffractive methods of feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad, "Field Notes for Future Petropractices" addresses the artworks Oil Ontology (2017), Crude Illumination (2015), and Oil rituals for the future #6 (2018). Each of these uses the enigmatic product Crudoleum, 100% Pennsylvania Crude Oil Scalp Treatment, to enact the openended performativity of oil. My critical and creative practice, in which practices of making reciprocally determine and blur with practices of thinking, examines the early American oil industry and its entanglements with mysticism. This period matters because it is the commonly accepted historical origination of crude oil as a global energy commodity. As new energy regimes and new critiques of the Anthropocene emerge, it is crucial to continue examining how the ontological status of oil as a fossil fuel persists. Why is it taken for granted that oil-an earth material that exceeds anthropocentric categorization-is represented exclusively as fuel? The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism. Or to put the point the other way around, representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. (Barad 2007, 46) Oil does something profoundly different than ideology. It restructures our relationships and capacities to perceive. Oil produces our daily lives, our daily selves, our daily communities Elia Vargas is an Oakland, California-based artist and scholar. He works across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on naturecultural media practices. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly salon on critical, intersectional perspectives of art and technology. He collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions, and has worked at internationally acclaimed interactive design studios. As an educator and organizer, he is a steward for self-determination through critical and creative practice. His current work considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry and argues for refiguring crude oil as media to decenter anthropocentric representations of natu...

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Section: Oil Art Agential Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media

Vargas¹

2021

Media+Environment

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“…Can they filter through, when those listening are so far removed from the original context of production, arriving after the trace of analogue continuity has been fundamentally, irrevocably transformed via digitised consumption? How does Bush's ‘desire to carve and hence adjust the world’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012, p. 89), her sound world, translate into a technical context continually and rapidly splintered into information bits and spliced together again, a world continually processing calculations? Do we hear analogue, do we feel it, or can it be best understood as an intention or orientation within time – an invitation to listen, a mnemotemporal technique, that echoes within the sonic infrastructure at several points removed from the scenes of transmission?…”

Section: Director's Cut Not Remixmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This temporal quality is impossible to pin to an exact point – comparable with the winding back and forth of analogue tape in edit/playback – the point at which we may say: there the analogue is. We may surmise, however, that utilising analogue technologies to re-produce the songs so that they may be heard again – and differently – is a strategy to ‘make cuts where necessary, while not forgoing the duration of things’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012, p. 81).…”

Section: Director's Cut Not Remixmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing with time: Kate Bush's temporal strategies and resistant time consciousness

Withers¹

2016

Pop. Mus.

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General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Snow (2011). In these albums Bush plays with the temporal qualities of recorded music to create the conditions for self-reflexive internal time consciousness to emerge within the listener. I argue that self-reflexive internal time consciousness is a process that enables a listener to gain some understanding that they are embroiled in an act of perception forged via active engagement with recorded music. Bush creates these conditions in two principle ways: In Director's Cut she disturbs the memory of previous recorded versions that are re-visited on the album so they can be mobilised as new, interpretative-perceptive acts. In 50 Words for Snow she uses duration as a structure to support the construction of extensive perception. Bush plays with time on these albums because her conceptual music relies upon the uninterrupted unfolding of consciousness as it becomes interlaced with her recordings, understood in the Husserlian sense of temporal objects. Implicit to her temporal strategies is a critique of contemporary listening conditions and how they undermine the very forging of the perceptual act.

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“…¶12 Kember and Zylinska's reading of performative media suggests that our relationship with memory as it is mediated by technologies of recording and presentation like the video cameras and projectors used in my theatrical production, create "media events with a difference." 22 These are not simply representations of performances, nor memories of action, but, in the vein of J. L. Austin's performative utterances, 23 they are co-creations that have a "lifeness," 24 an agency, and unanticipated potentiality of their own. Kember and Zylinska point to the example of the "event" of turning on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to try to discover the elusive Higgs-Boson, dubbed the "God particle," a building block for all matter in the universe.…”

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confidence: 99%

Making Memories: Time and Responsibility in Intermedial Metatheatre

Gasoi

2019

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That performance can be captured and replayed may be a given, but much less well-understood is the relationship between that stored performance, the memory of a performed act, and the live event. The practice of intermedial theatre offers a unique way to probe that relationship, and the awareness of metatheatre further exposes the links between memory, technology, and performance. This paper argues that intermedial metatheatre, and my own work as a director, video-maker, and video performer for a 2014 production of Daniel MacIvor’s play Never Swim Alone, provides a valuable model for research-creation that can shed light on these questions in an embodied and experiential manner. Engaging with Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylisnka’s notion of performative media, as well as the concept of memory work from Annette Kuhn, I offer thoughts on materiality, time, and mediated memory, captured through technologies like camera and sound recording equipment, and in constructed spaces like studios and rehearsal rooms, represented by projection mapping software and digital projectors in the theatre space. All these are integrated into the network of actors and techniques that make up current practices in intermedial theatrical creation. Can this research begin to unravel ideas of authenticity and liveness when reactivating memories in relation to live actors, and before an audience? And what of our responsibility to the digital representation and the live performer when bringing these memories and moments together? How does the network of technologies and practitioners in intermedial theatre creation and presentation, understand and respect the “lifeness” of a mediated memory?

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Life after New Media

Cited by 310 publications

References 0 publications

Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media

Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media

Playing with time: Kate Bush's temporal strategies and resistant time consciousness

Making Memories: Time and Responsibility in Intermedial Metatheatre

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