Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its (...) diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere. (shrink)

The text analyses the new images produced by artificial neural networks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the perspective of photography and, more specifically, cameraless photography. The images produced by GANs are located within the wider framework of the impact of machine learning technologies on contemporary visual culture and contemporary artistic practices. In the final section, the article focuses on the work of two artists who have explicity tackled the relations between GAN-generated images and the traditions of photography and (...) cameraless photography, with their multiple intertwinings of human and non-human agencies: Mario Klingemann and Grégory Chatonsky. (shrink)

Parmi les effets les plus importants de l’impact actuel des technologies d’IA sur les images et la culture visuelle il y a une réorganisation profonde des liens entre images et mots, entre le visible et le dicible : ce qui peut être vu et ce qui peut être dit. L’article analyse les causes et les enjeux de cette réorganisation, en soulignant le fait que le langage devient aujourd’hui un nouveau médium pour la production et la modification d’images, qu’on peut considérer (...) les prompts comme des nouveaux actes de langage et comme une forme d’« ekphrasis opératoire » et de « remédiation » des médias visuels et de leur histoire. Il souligne aussi le rôle fondamental joué par les « espaces latents » des modèles d’IA générative ( text-to-image et text-to-video ) en formulant dans la conclusion l’hypothèse qu’on puisse les considérer comme une nouvelle forme d’a priori historique. (shrink)

Recensendo nel 1923 il film Phantom di Murnau (1922), Balazs lo descrive come «un buon film tedesco»: tedesco non a causa del luogo in cui è stato prodotto ma del suo «stile» particolare, caratterizzato dal tentativo di «spiritualizzare la tecnica cinematografica». Questa possibilità di conciliare spirito e tecnica si fonda, secondo Balazs, sulla capacità del film di captare fotograficamente la Stimmung - termine intraducibile, che renderemo a volte con ‘tonalità affettiva’, ‘situazione’ o ‘a...

In una fase della teoria del cinema e dei media, come quella attuale, che appare segnata da un dibattito sempre più intenso sul significato e sulla portata di nozioni come quelle di medium e dispositivo, riprendere l’opera di autori come Dziga Vertov e Sergei M. Ejzenštejn, Siegfried Kracauer e Walter Benjamin, può risultare una via produttiva non solo nel tentativo di situare in una prospettiva storica il dibattito contemporaneo, ma anche di trovare nuove modi di pensare le nozioni citate di (...) medium e di dispositivo. Nel presente studio, l’autore esamina la riflessione di Ejzenštejn riguardo al dispositivo cinematografico come assemblage – flessibile, dinamico e in evoluzione – di tecniche, spazi e operazioni, concentrandosi su due momenti cruciali della sua lunga e complessa carriera: la conferenza The Dynamic Square tenuta a Hollywood nel 1930, e il progetto per film rimasto incompiuto e intitolato Glass House, presentato quello stesso anno alla Paramount. In entrambi i casi, Ejzenštejn considera lo schermo – una delle componenti cruciali del dispositivo cinematografico – come allo stesso tempo condizione senza la quale le immagini proiettate non possono essere visualizzate, come superfice di dimensioni e forme variabili, e come luogo di una serie di sperimentazioni sul montaggio e sullo spazio cinematografico, che in Glass House mette in luce le implicazioni estetiche e sociali di uno spazio completamente trasparente. (shrink)

Although Ejzenštejn never writes about the ontology of cinema as such, the fundamental traits of such an ontology may be reconstructed by analysing some of the recurrent ideas that reappear throughout his large body of writings, from the essays on montage written during the 1920s, to the unfinished book projects of Metod (1932-48), Montage (1937), Nonindifferent Nature (1945-47), all the way up to the still unpublished notes for a General History of Cinema which he wrote in 1947-48. Throughout these writings (...) cinema emerges as a medium based on montage whose goal is that of activating, emotionally and intellectually, the spectator. In order to pursue this goal, all the elements of the cinematic dispositif may be modified, and the most effective forms of montage disseminated throughout the history of the arts have to be located, analyzed, and taken as examples for the cinema of the future. Cinema thus emerges as a medium which is at the same time unstable (since its features may be modified at will) and diffused (since the principle of montage does not constitute its medium specificity but is rather a principle which manifests itself throughout the entire spectrum of media). (shrink)