Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image(New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts)

If virtuality is being celebrated as heralding a radically new era, rich with new possibilities and futures hitherto unimagined through cybernetics, networking and digitalizaton, such claims are also being viewed with deep scepticism and countered by renewed interest in the groundedness and referentiality of the concept of the index. In this transdisciplinary book, major artists, filmmakers, film theorists, philosophers, literary critics, information theorists and cultural analysts examine the twists and turns of the contesting terms of virtuality and indexicality in contemporary cultural theory in relation to history, trauma, sexuality, textuality, anxiety, simulated lives, code, digital cinema, science fiction, and contemporary art. Antony Bryant, Juli Carson, N. Katherine Hayles, Anna Johnson, Mary Kelly, Brian Massumi, Claire Pajaczkowska, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Martha Rosler, Alison Rowley, Trinh T. Minha, Samuel Weber, and Paul Willemen, draw on concrete practices, ranging from film, video and chatrooms to airport spaces, conceptual art and textiles, to offer critically engaged, sometimes sceptical, analyses of contemporary image worlds in the light of a continuing allegiance to grounded histories and critical practice.

Table of Contents:
Series Preface - Griselda Pollock Introduction - Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock 1 Traumas of Code - N. Katherine Hayles 2 Of Mice and Mien: Or Perhaps of Mouses and Mien? (anyway with apologies to John Steinbeck) - Antony Bryant 3 A Virtual Indication - Samuel Weber 4 The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat - Brian Massumi 5 For a Comparative Film Studies - Paul Willeman 6 'Night Passage': The Depth of Time - Trinh T. Minh-ha interviewed by Alison Rowley Notes Index

About the Author :
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and, since 2001, Director, Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds, UK. Known for her critical interventions in feminist, social, Jewish and postcolonial studies in art's histories, her work ranges from nineteenth and twentieth century fields to that of contemporary art and cinema, museum studies and cultural theory. Her publications include Old Mistresses, Vision and Difference, Avant-Garde Gambits, Generations and Geographies, and Differencing the Canon.