Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
85
result(s) for
"Crary, Jonathan"
Sort by:
i Dubai
As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. The Baudelarian flمaneur is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses the cell phone to text and call and access the Internet, all the while snapping digital images on the fly. If the arcades were representative of early capitalism, then perhaps the postmodern shopping playgrounds of Dubai are exemplars of advanced capitalism. With this in mind, when photographer Joel Sternfeld visited these malls in 2008, he documented them with the consumer fetish object of the moment--the iPhone. In the process, he achieves a very particular unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit of an era is used to document that era. Yet Sternfeld's iPhone camera also gets past mass media images of the Emirate to find a human component.--From publisher description.
Book
IDubai
As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. The Baudelarian flâneur is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses the cell phone to text and call and access the Internet, all the while snapping digital images on the fly. If the arcades were representative of early capitalism, then perhaps the postmodern shopping playgrounds of Dubai are exemplars of advanced capitalism. With this in mind, when photographer Joel Sternfeld visited these malls in 2008, he documented them with the consumer fetish object of the moment--the iPhone. In the process, he achieves a very particular unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit of an era is used to document that era. Yet Sternfeld's iPhone camera also gets past mass media images of the Emirate to find a human component.--From publisher description.
Book
Suspensions of Perception
Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography.
Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.
Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.
Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices.
Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
eBook
The Camera Obscura and its Subject
Crary offers a historical perspective on the ways in which technology in the form of optical devices like the camera obscura shaped knowledge and the way vision was constituted in the past. The operational structure of the camera obscura separated the observing subject from the object of observation and thus contributed to the belief in an external verifiable reality. Unlike optical devices which dealt with perspective, the image of the exterior world produced in the dark interior chamber of the camera obscura marginalised the corporeal body of the viewer. This process shifted the axis of the means of understanding the world away from the body and the senses and placed it firmly in the mind. This separation of mind and body, as espoused by the philosopher Descartes, dominated European thought for over two hundred years.
Book Chapter
