Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media

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U of Minnesota Press, 2002 - Performing Arts - 259 pages
In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years -- sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.

From this emerges a materialist theory -- an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks's approach leads to an appreciation of the works' mortal bodies: film's volatile emulsion, video's fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as "virtual" and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Video Haptics and Erotics
11
The Haptic Subject
31
Animal Appetites Animal Identifications
33
I Am Very Frightened by the Things I Film
51
Haptics and Erotics
65
Heres Gazing at You
67
Love the One Youre With Straight Women Gay Porn and the Scene of Erotic Looking
83
Loving a Disappearing Image
101
Js Smell Movie A Shot List
151
Haptics and Electronics
155
Videos Body Analog and Digital
157
How Electrons Remember
171
Immanence Online
187
Ten Years of Dreams about Art
203
Notes
227
Filmography and Videography with Distributor Information
251

III Olfactory Haptics
121
The Logic of Smell
123
Institute Benjamenta An Olfactory View
137

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Page 3 - The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.

About the author (2002)

Laura U. Marks is associate professor of film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa.

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