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Did digital imaging throw documentary into an ontological crisis?
Written by David Tames on August 20, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Documentary, Featured, Photography
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Scholars have long discussed the ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in photographic representation with its seductive verisimilitude. Bill Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (The MIT Press, 1992), the first book-length critical analysis of the...  Continue Reading...

Expanded Cinema: Still fresh after forty years
Written by David Tames on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media
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A few months ago I pulled Gene Youngblood’s classic Expanded Cinema (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1970, available online) off the shelf and read it again. The pages in my well worn softcover edition were falling out, the glue having dried over the two decades I’ve owned the book....  Continue Reading...

Memory and the end of reality
Written by David Tames on August 11, 2010
Filed Under Art, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, Writing
6 Comments  

The transformation from media as a form of cultural production to media as entertainment has lead us into a crisis as we enter the fifth phase of history. Marshall McLuhan (1962, 2005) divided history in four phases: 1. culture of oral communication, 2. manuscript culture, 3. the Gutenberg...  Continue Reading...