Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman

Description

Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman begins with a comprehensive and original anthropological analysis of Vertov’s film The Man With a Movie Camera. Tomas then explores the film’s various aspects and contributions to media history and practice through detailed discussions of selected case studies. The first concerns the way Snow’s La Région Centrale and De La extend and/or develops important theoretical and technical aspects of Vertov’s original film, in particular those aspects that have made the film so important in the history of cinema. The linkage between Vertov’s film and the works discussed in the case studies will also serve to illustrate the historical and theoretical significance of a comparative approach of this kind, and illustrate the pertinence of adopting a ‘relational approach’ to the history of media and its contemporary practice, an approach that is no longer focused exclusively on the technical question of the new in contemporary media practices but, in contrast, situates a work and measures its originality in historical, intermedia, and ultimately political terms. Cover Halftitle Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction Part I Threshold
When a Ritual Process Speaks of Machine Vision and Cyborg Prototypes: A Film Document, Circa 1929 1 Manufacturing Vision and the Posthuman, Circa 1929: Kino-Eye, The Man with a Movie Camera, and the Perceptual Reconstructio Photographic and cinematic rites of passage Preamble to a kinomatic rite of passage: A note on Vertov’s politics of representation The Man with a Movie Camera: A kinomatic rite of passage On machine vision, the rationalization of observation and its linkage to a posthuman spectatorial consciousness: Vertov on “th Beyond poetic documentary: The posthuman and its “post-ocularcentric” culture of representation Kino-Eye’s logical excess: Vertov on the total collectivization of the human sensorium “Object” lesson Part II Enigma of the Central Region
A Microhistory of Machine Vision and Posthuman Consciousness, Circa 1969–72 2 La Région Centrale: Basic Cultural, Technical, and Formal Filiations Basic technical parameters and filiations 3 Toward a Cosmic Rite of Passage: External and Internal Locations and a Play of Authorship External locations Establishing a cultural context: Modeling film space as cosmic space 4 La Région Centrale: Liminality, Knowledge Production, Pedagogy The complexity of a visual language and the mysteries of an implicit structure The culture and symbolism of acoustic communication 5 La Région Centrale: From Cosmic to Posthuman Rite of Passage Rite of Separation Liminal Stage Rite of Reincorporation 6 De La (1969–71): Authorship, Automation, and the Posthuman 7 A Comparative Schematic Analysis of the Automated Narrative and its Mechanical Logic in Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Came Part III The Public Deployment of Machine Vision and the Programmed Materialization of the Posthuman in Collective Social Spac 8 A Posthuman Future in the Age of the Algorithm: Harun Farocki’s Documentation of the Operational Image and its Culture of S Brief return to The Man with a Movie Camera and its propositions concerning machine-based vision Strategies of observation and surveillance Machine vision for the twenty-first century Eye/Machine I-III and their propositions concerning machine vision Counter-Music: The city, transportation systems, command centers, and contemporary strategies of surveillance A new cinematographic counter-practice? Notes Bibliography Index