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Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema
Written by David Tames on December 15, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Critical Theory, New Media
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Among my favorite books is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, in spite of originally being published in 1970, it still offers a fresh perspective on the possibilities of new media art. Imagine a collection of essays that takes Youngblood’s book as a starting point. Well,...  Continue Reading...

A framework for thinking about cyberspace
Written by David Tames on December 1, 2010
Filed Under Books, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, The Media
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Daniel Downes suggests in Interactive Realism: The Poetics Of Cyberspace (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) that it is people who construct social reality through their interactions, critiquing the “transformative turn” in media studies. Distinguishing clearly between the Internet...  Continue Reading...

Cinema will eventually become a flexible means of writing
Written by David Tames on November 22, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Filmmaking, Front Page, Music Video, New Media, Writing
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In 1948 Alexandre Astruc, a filmmaker and theorist, suggested the notion of caméra-stylo (camera pen) in his essay, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” which appears in the book, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Edited by Ginette Vincendeau and...  Continue Reading...

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...

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