Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman

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 develop 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 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: Threshold: When a Ritual Process Speaks of Machine Vision and Cyborg Prototypes: A Film Document, Circa 1929 Chapter 1. Manufacturing Vision and the Posthuman Circa 1929: Kino-eye, The Man with a Movie Camera, and the Perceptual Reconstruction of Social Identity Part II: Enigma of the Central Region: A Microhistory of Machine Vision and Posthuman Consciousness, Circa 1969-1972 Chapter 2. La Région Centrale: Basic Cultural, Technical and Formal Filiations. Chapter 3. Toward a Cosmic Rite of Passage: External & Internal Locations and a Play of Authorship Chapter 4. La Région Centrale: Liminality, Knowledge Production, Pedagogy. Chapter 5. La Région Centrale: From Cosmic to Posthuman Rite of Passage Chapter 6. De La (1969-71): Authorship, Automation and the Posthuman. Chapter 7. A Comparative Schematic Analysis of the Automated Narrative and its Mechanical Logic in Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Michael Snow's De La (1969-1972). Part III The Public Deployment of Machine Vision and the Programmed Materialization of the Posthuman in Collective Social Space, Two Early Twenty-First Century Video Documents Chapter 8. A Posthuman Future in the Age of the Algorithm: Farock's Documentation of the Operational Image and its Culture of Surveillance Bibliography Index

About the Author :
David Tomas is a Professor at the School of Visual Arts, University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada.

Review :
Tomas, an artist and anthropologist at the Université du Québec, Montréal, continues the work he undertook in Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (CH, Dec'04, 42-2261), exhorting readers to view visual technologies differently. In this volume, Tomas attempts to shift attention from aesthetic products to ritual practices. Specifically, he argues for understanding the mechanical process of filming as a rite of passage whereby the image is taken, processed, and reincorporated into the socio-symbolic order. This ritual structure becomes the basis for a comparative anthropological study of Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera, Michael Snow's La Région Centrale and De La, and Harun Farocki's trilogy Eye/Machine and Counter-Music. The experimental, posthuman processes involved in shooting these unique films is of primary interest, leading to detailed discussions of the filmmaker's intentions and abstract theorization of their specific execution. For this reason, Tomas's esoteric, though intriguing, revisioning of ilm's history and future is likely of most use to experts. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.