Light Image Imagination
Light Image Imagination
MARTHA BLASSNIGG (EDITOR)
GUSTAV DEUTSCH
HANNA SCHIMEK
Series: Framing Film
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: Amsterdam University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn
Pages: 312
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdxn
Search for reviews of this book
Book Info
Light Image Imagination
Book Description:

Light Image Imagination is an anthology of text- and image-essays by international scholars and artists who lead critical discourses in audio-visual media history, practice and theory. The main focus of the contributions lies in discourses and topics around 19th and 20th century innovations in arts, media and technology, and their media-archaeological and philosophical foundations. It juxtaposes text and image-essays to stimulate dialogue and associative interconnections in order to discuss the creation, perception and projection of images (both mental and material) and their specific relationship with light and imagination. A key feature of both the individual contributions and the book as a whole is that disciplinary boundaries are challenged in order to amplify and enrich the thinking about mediated images. The anthology is accessible to a broad readership and will appeal especially to a constituency that views the boundaries between science, art and technology as a permeable and exciting territory to explore. The contributing authors and artists work at the interdisciplinary intersections of the Arts, Sciences and Humanities. Their expertise includes film and media theory, media archaeology, cinema history and theory, philosophy, history of science and technology, astronomy, computer music, literature studies, neuroscience, psychology, art history, art practice (painting, photography, film, video, digital arts; music composition).

eISBN: 978-90-485-1943-9
Subjects: Film Studies
You do not have access to this book on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.
Log in to your personal account or through your institution.
Table of Contents
Export Selected Citations Export to NoodleTools Export to RefWorks Export to EasyBib Export a RIS file (For EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, Zotero, Mendeley...) Export a Text file (For BibTex)
Select / Unselect all
  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. 1-4)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. 5-8)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.2
  3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (pp. 9-10)
    Martha Blassnigg, Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.3
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 11-22)
    Martha Blassnigg
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.4

    Light Image Imaginationexplores the explicit, and more particularly the implicit, interrelationship between light and the creation of (re)mediated, (im)material, mental images.¹ It brings together authors and artists from a range of disciplines, including film and media theory, media archaeology, cinema history and theory, philosophy, history of science and technology, astronomy, computer music, literature studies, neuroscience, psychology, art history and art practice (art and media practice: painting, photography, film, video and digital arts; music composition). A key feature of both the individual contributions and the anthology as a whole is that disciplinary boundaries are extended in order to amplify and...

  5. 1 HOMAGE TO THE POLAR LIGHTS
    1 HOMAGE TO THE POLAR LIGHTS (pp. 23-28)
    Nina Czegledy
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.5
  6. CHAPTER 2 Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses
    CHAPTER 2 Colour and Sound: Transcending the Limits of the Senses (pp. 29-46)
    Fay Zika
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.6

    Perception through the senses is traditionally individuated on the basis of distinct sense organs of reception: vision for the eyes, hearing through the ears, touch for hands and skin, smell through the nose and taste through the mouth.¹ In this context, the possibility of transcending the limits between the different senses tends to be a matter assigned to the imagination, a faculty whose role is largely to extrapolate beyond the sensory content of perception.² The suggestion of seeing with one’s ears or hearing with one’s eyes verges towards the cranky or even the hallucinatory. My aim in this chapter is...

  7. 3 COGITATIVA
    3 COGITATIVA (pp. 47-52)
    Kyrillos Sarris
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.7
  8. CHAPTER 4 Light Recording: Audiograms – Koenig’s Flame Pictures of Language
    CHAPTER 4 Light Recording: Audiograms – Koenig’s Flame Pictures of Language (pp. 53-71)
    Marianne Kubaczek and Wolfgang Pircher
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.8

    The voice is one of our most complex features, and even today its technical simulation is, to a large extent, not possible. Voices are unique and recognisable; however, it is very difficult to imagine or remember them. What is lacking is their image. The following essay is about the history of some light traces of speech, which glimmered for a brief period in the second half of the 19th century. It is an event that marks a decisive juncture in the history of audiovisual media praxis: the attempt to make sound visible, and thus imaginable, without any recourse to music....

  9. 5 A WEDDING FROM THE ARCHIVE: PERSONS, DETAILS AND SITUATIONS (2003-) K295 (M)
    5 A WEDDING FROM THE ARCHIVE: PERSONS, DETAILS AND SITUATIONS (2003-) K295 (M) (pp. 72-76)
    George Hadjimichalis
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.9
  10. CHAPTER 6 Computer-Aided Musical Imagination
    CHAPTER 6 Computer-Aided Musical Imagination (pp. 77-86)
    Eduardo Miranda
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.10

    Perhaps one of the most significant aspects differentiating humans from other animals is the fact that we are inherently musical. Our compulsion to listen to and appreciate sound arrangements beyond the mere purposes of linguistic communication is extraordinary. From the discovery almost three thousand years ago of the direct relationship between the pitch of a note and the length of a string or pipe to the latest computer models of human musical cognition and intelligence, composers have increasingly looked to science to provide new and challenging ways to study and compose music.

    Music is generally associated with the artistic expression...

  11. 7 TOPOI – SCAN-SPACE NO#4 – ARTIST’S STUDIO
    7 TOPOI – SCAN-SPACE NO#4 – ARTIST’S STUDIO (pp. 87-92)
    Vicki Betsou
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.11
  12. CHAPTER 8 Light Is the Envelope: The Innovations of Paul Cézanne
    CHAPTER 8 Light Is the Envelope: The Innovations of Paul Cézanne (pp. 93-108)
    Amy Ione
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.12

    In 1905, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) told Émile Bernard (1868-1941): ‘Draw; but it is the reflection which envelops; light, through the general reflection, is the envelope’. (Rewald 1995: 316) An interesting theory, to be sure, but what precisely is he saying? Perhaps the larger point is that deducing firm principles about Cézanne’s approach to painting is not an easy task, particularly if we rely on his own words for insight. Indeed, Cézanne himself stated how limited words are in capturing artistic expression in an earlier letter to Bernard,² where he explained that ‘[t]alking about art is almost useless. (…) The man...

  13. 9 IMAGE IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
    9 IMAGE IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (pp. 109-114)
    Christina dePian
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.13
  14. CHAPTER 10 The ‘Delightful(l) Mind’: A Case for Aesthetic Intuition
    CHAPTER 10 The ‘Delightful(l) Mind’: A Case for Aesthetic Intuition (pp. 115-144)
    Martha Blassnigg
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.14

    This chapter returns to the beginnings of mechanised optical serial image technologies during the 19th century and revisits accounts of the experiential dimensions of light in a specific context of artistic, philosophical and scientific histories of ideas on aesthetics, intuition and imagination. It will situate Etienne-Jules Marey’s work in parallel with discussions around the receiver’s pro-active engagement during perception in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the works and writings on light by J.W. Goethe and J.M.W. Turner. In doing so it will address aspects that inform the particular condition of the ‘observing participant’ during the aesthetic engagement confronting contrasts...

  15. 11 DOMUS AUREA
    11 DOMUS AUREA (pp. 145-150)
    Edgar Lissel
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.15
  16. CHAPTER 12 Designing and Revealing: Some Aspects of a Genealogy of Projection
    CHAPTER 12 Designing and Revealing: Some Aspects of a Genealogy of Projection (pp. 151-187)
    Siegfried Zielinski
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.16

    Projection is a multifarious¹ concept with many different derivations (Herkünfte). It is equally at home in the sciences as well as in philosophy and psychoanalysis, painting and architecture, or media technologies, including cartography. In the second part of Kazimir Malevich’s great Suprematism manifesto, which he wrote in early 1922, the master of modern abstract art pointed out how impossible a task it is to really get to grips with this phenomenon.

    The human skull represents infinity for the movement of ideas. It resembles the universe, for it also has no roof or floor and has space for a projection apparatus...

  17. 13 LIGHT | IMAGE | IMAGINATION ATLAS
    13 LIGHT | IMAGE | IMAGINATION ATLAS (pp. 188-192)
    Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.17
  18. CHAPTER 14 Image, Light and the Passage to the Semi-Material Object
    CHAPTER 14 Image, Light and the Passage to the Semi-Material Object (pp. 193-214)
    Michael Punt
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.18

    In October 1888, just two months after John Logie Baird was born, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince made a contribution to the story of cinema by filming the people and traffic crossing the River Aire at Leeds Bridge in the north of England for a few seconds. Le Prince is believed to have used a single lens camera of his own design made at his workshop and which he called a ‘receiver’. Le Prince was born in 1842, the son of a middle-ranking officer in the French Army and was well positioned for his place in the history of photographic...

  19. 15 MNEMARCHIVE
    15 MNEMARCHIVE (pp. 215-220)
    Mark-Paul Meyer
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.19
  20. CHAPTER 16 Light in Black: On Olivier Deprez’ BlackBookBlack
    CHAPTER 16 Light in Black: On Olivier Deprez’ BlackBookBlack (pp. 221-235)
    Jan Baetens
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.20

    Black as, technically speaking, the absence of colour is often considered the opposite of light. Yet black in art should not be mistaken for the structural or functional counterpart of black in real life or in nature. Art does not coincide precisely with nature. It is instead – at least for those who do not stick to a strictly mimetic or realist approach of things aesthetic – nature transformed, corrected, expanded, reworked; in short, remade.¹ A good example of this antirealist stance is Stéphane Mallarmé’s influential thinking on literature. A key figure in the modern reinvention of spatial poetry and the spatial...

  21. 17 DISTORTED SPACES
    17 DISTORTED SPACES (pp. 236-240)
    Attila Csörgó
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.21
  22. CHAPTER 18 Colour Beyond the Sky: The Chromatic Revolution in Astronomy
    CHAPTER 18 Colour Beyond the Sky: The Chromatic Revolution in Astronomy (pp. 241-268)
    Tim Otto Roth and Robert Fosbury
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.22

    These were the notable remarks, not by an astronomer but by the chief art critic of the British newspaperThe Guardian, Jonathan Jones. There is no doubt that the Hubble Space Telescope (Hubble or HST) has made breathtaking scientific discoveries in the years since its launch into Earth orbit in 1990. But the dramatic colour pictures of nebulae demonstrate that the art critic did not really refer to the achievements from the scientific perspective alone. In fact the visual revolution took place in the mind of the general public, changing forever their view of the nocturnal sky.

    Even the tabloid...

  23. 19 SUBLIMINAL SURFACES
    19 SUBLIMINAL SURFACES (pp. 269-274)
    Margarete Jahrmann
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.23
  24. NOTES; IMAGE ESSAYS
    NOTES; IMAGE ESSAYS (pp. 275-288)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.24
  25. NOTES; ON LIGHT | IMAGE: A FORUM FOR ART AND SCIENCE
    NOTES; ON LIGHT | IMAGE: A FORUM FOR ART AND SCIENCE (pp. 289-298)
    Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.25
  26. BIOGRAPHIES
    BIOGRAPHIES (pp. 299-310)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt45kdxn.26