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Living the Opposite Sex
Studying the life situations of trans persons reveals preceding and ongoing political, societal and cultural transformations. This ethnographic study concerns individuals in Andalusia, Southern Spain, who do not fit the sex and gender assigned to them at birth. Christoph Imhof thus investigates issues leading back to the repressive situation during the dictatorship of Franco and to contemporary endeavours and achievements regarding acceptance, citizenship and self-determination. He highlights the pioneering role that Andalusia has played within Spain regarding trans issues since the late 1990s and shows how trans persons in Southern Spain have experienced the growing social, medical and legal acceptance of their gender non-conformity.
The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion
Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006–2019), Wei Dong investigates the affective meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal text of Chinese reality TV. The focus lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect – in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body – have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration.
The Invention of ›Outsider Art‹
What does it mean to be called an ›Outsider‹? Marion Scherr investigates structural inequalities and the myth of the Other in Western art history, examining the role of ›Outsider Art‹ in contemporary art worlds in the UK. By shifting the focus from art world professionals to those labelled ›Outsider Artists‹, she counteracts one-sided representations of them being otherworldly, raw, and uninfluenced. Instead, the artists are introduced as multi-faceted individuals in constant exchange with their social environment, employing diverse strategies in dealing with their exclusion. The book reframes their voices and artworks as complex, serious and meaningful cultural contributions, and challenges their attested Otherness in favour of a more inclusive, all-encompassing understanding of art.
The Literature of Exclusion
In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twe...
Queer Turkey
Before President Erdogan's repressive politics took hold, queer cultures were more visible than ever in Turkey. Queer Turkey offers a broad range of reflections on queer Turkish cultures within a transnational, Euro-American context. Based on his experience in Istanbul, Ralph J. Poole shares his impressions of queer desires between Muslim tradition and global pop, observes what goes on in the hamam, and wonders about Arabesk culture. The book features discussions of queer travel writers, poets, playwrights, and film directors. Their multifarious works manifest the subtle and subversive ways in which artists crisscross the cultural borders of East and West. With its many facets of Turkish-Euro-American cultural interactions, Queer Turkey outlines a kaleidoscope of transnational poetics.
Media Archaeology
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.
Critical Zones
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change. This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinu...
Mental Health | Atmospheres | Video Games
Gaming has never been disconnected from reality. When we engage with ever more lavish virtual worlds, something happens to us. The game imposes itself on us and influences how we feel about it, the world, and ourselves. How do games accomplish this and to what end? The contributors explore the video game as an atmospheric medium of hitherto unimagined potential. Is the medium too powerful, too influential? A danger to our mental health or an ally through even the darkest of times? This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2019 and 2020 to provide answers to these questions.
The Eye of the Master
A social history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence," a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surve...
