Stephen Melville is Professor of History of Art at the Ohio State University and has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. With Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon he curated the major exhibition of contemporary painting As Painting: Division and Displacement (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2001). His publications include As Painting: Division And Displacement (exhibition catalogue, MIT Press 2001), and Seams: Art As A Philosophical Context (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1996). He is currently completing a book on Hegel and contemporary art. In 2007, Stephen Melville was invited to ...

This text by Wolfgang Ernst is the keynote lecture of the conference The Anarchival Impulse in the Uses of the Image in Contemporary Art, organised by the University of Barcelona. In “Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive.” the author analyses how the archive in the traditional sense, based on rigorous classification and secrecy, must be redefined in the light of the enormous potential for dissemination and organisation that arises from the digital media: archives are now ephemeral, adapted to various supports and, for the first time, more than a specific space, they occupy time. Wolfgang Ernst is Professor of ...

Ina Blom is a Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo, where she also got her Ph.D (The Cut Through Time. A Version of the Dada/Neo-Dada Repetition. UiO, 1999). Her fields of research and teaching are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on media art practices and media aesthetics. A former music critic, she has also worked extensively as an art critic and curator, contributing to Artforum, Parkett, Afterall, Frieze and Texte zur Kunst. Recent books include On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Television ...

The Mediation Group is made up of curators, educators, mediators, art practitioners, and thinkers-by-doing; essentially, people related to education and public programmes, people who work in or are associated with museums, and members of the L’Internationale Confederation. However, this is not just a working group or support group. Rather, it is also a reading group, a debate group, and, above all, a group of people who are looking for new ways of thinking together, sharing experiences, and having fun. While they are all committed to the OME program activities and materials, their work also involves engagement through mutual affective support. ...

Linda Williams teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Buñuel, eastern and western melodrama, film theory, and selected “sex genres.” Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993), the co-edited Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill, 2000). She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, ...

Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Educated in Athens, London and Strasbourg, Costas has taught at the Universities of Middlesex, Lancaster, Prague, Athens, Griffith and Nanjing.Costas is a founding member of the Critical Legal Conference; founding member of the Birkbeck Law School and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities; managing editor of Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought; managing director of the publishing house Birkbeck Law Press. Costas has written extensively in legal and political philosophy, human rights, aesthetics and ...

Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and ...

T. J. Clark was born in Bristol, England, in 1943, and educated at Bristol Grammar School, Cambridge University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has taught at various places in England and the U.S., since 1988 at Berkeley, where he is at present George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair, and Professor of Art History. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, (both 1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1985; Farewell ...

In this essay Dr Tony Myatt describes how processes and systems were applied in early experimental music, and contrasts two approaches to the use of systematic and algorithmic processes in experimental computer music. He distinguishes two practices, one based on the evolution of historical models which emphasise a rationalist position, and another more radical contemporary approach based on the material substance of computer sound and technological processes. Dr Tony Myatt is the Director of the Music Research Centre at the University of York, UK. He is the principle investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s New Aesthetics in Computer ...

In “The road to plunderphonia” Chris Cutler looks at the critical role of memory—on which both the origination and reproduction of music turns—and attempts to unpick to what extent the specific nature of a memory system shapes the music that it mediates, with reference, especially, to the third and newest of these systems: sound recording. Chris investigates how the fact and the practice of sound recording have transformed every aspect of production and reception in the field of organised sound, creating wholly new genres and understandings. If the medium is the message, this essay is an attempt to understand what ...