history

- – - W A X W E B – - – D a v i d _ B l a i r – -


In early 1914, a Spiritualist cinematographer from the Supernormal Picture Society of London joined the Royal Expedition to the Antarctic.



history, myth, video, vidlit, web

Screening Room with Robert Gardner

Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner (Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss), who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard for many years. This unique program dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and experimental film, welcoming such artists as Jan Lenica, John and Faith Hubley, Emile DeAntonio, Jean Rouch, Ricky Leacock, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow. Frequently, guests such as Octavio Paz, Stanley Cavell, and Rudolph Arnheim appeared as well. The filmmakers presented on the show are now considered the most influential contributors to modern experimental film, documentary, and animation.

Robert Gardner’s personal website: www.robertgardner.net.



archive, avant garde, film, history

Moving text in avant-garde poetry.

Teemu Ikonen: Moving text in avant-garde poetry. Towards a poetics of textual motion

In the last decades of the 20th century many writers have been interested in the expressional possibilities offered by the democratization of the moving image, especially by the video media. One result from this is the video poetry developed, among others, by E.M. Melo e Castro, Richard Kostelanetz and Arnaldo Antunes from the 60’s onwards. If one were to trace a thorough history of the virtual textual motion, the tradition of video and multimedia poetry should be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it could also be fruitful to examine how video artists have experimented with the so-called natural language and linguistic articulation. Here I’m thinking especially of Gary Hill



digital poetics, history, vidlit

Arnheim



“The technology of the modern media has produced new possibilities of interaction. (…) What is needed is a wider view encompassing the coming rewards in the context of the treasures left us by the past experiences, possessions and insights.”

Media Art History. Summer 2000, RUDOLF ARNHEIM (b. 1904 – d. 2007)



art, history, interactive

REFRESH!



history, new media, theory



Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print.



book, history


Technologies of Writing

“The phrase ‘technologies of writing’ refers not to the script or alphabet, the calligraphic or marking system that a text employs, but to the practical methods by which these systems are applied—pencil, brush, quill, ink, paint, print, machine key and pixel—and to the material surfaces and sites of writing itself—clay, animal skin, parchment, linen, wood pulp and cyberspace.”



history, technology, writing

The History of Writing

The pictograph for “water” pronounced nu became the symbol for the consonantal sound of N.; This practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an ALPHABET or the “One Sign-One sound” system of writing.



acrophony, alphabet, history, writing

1980s-1995: MIT Visible Language Group



history, language, visible