Cubitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 22095 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cubitt |
| FAMILY NAME | Cubitt |
| SIGNATURE | CUBITT |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7633-6809 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Love in the Time of Computation: (Afterthoughts on ‘The Mass Image’ inspired by Walker Evans)
In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lay in the photographers’ love for their subjects based in an unexpressed but significant ecological orientation. This analysis leads towards a critical reconsideration of the concept of ‘mass image’, a term developed to describe the production and management…
Posthumous Sound and the General Imagination
The 1997 discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old flute made from the femur of a cave bear, with its intimation of reanimating nonhumans, and the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft carrying an eclectic set of sound recordings intended to be heard in the distant future by nonhuman others: two sonic events that frame the possible meanings of posthumous. Together these examples and others question whether everything audible is already over—the bear…
Imagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): Two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014
The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Takin…
Turning disaster into crisis
This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities
Pandemic: Invisibility and silence
Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take whips to outsiders whose gender or skin colour they despise at the behest of billionaire warlords fr…
Against the New Normal
COVID-19 is now part of the resources out of which any future must be made. The temptation is to curl back into private misery and fatalism. The opportunity is to further the design of neonationalist, neoliberal returns to pre-1917 norms of extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and unmitigated exploitation of technical and ecological resources. The challenge is to build a future of public health, wealth, education, and environmental justice
Imaging global communications: An ecocritique
Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. …
Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritiqe from Hollywood to the Mass Image
Limen, portal, network subjectivities
Limina, the thresholds between worlds are by nature sacred. Passage between the worlds of the living and the dead is strange and holy. For the ancients, and for the religions of the book, precise places of transition to another world are scenes of veneration
Liquid Crystals: A Roundtable
This Roundtable began life as a public event on the subject of liquid crystals in our visual, material, media, scientific and artistic cultures. The event’s premise was that liquid crystals are the ur-form that constitute and govern Modernity and its after-shocks. For sure this is because the dialectic of liquidity and crystallization, of flow and refraction, is key to the advent of screen-based media (LCD TVs, computers and mobile devices) and t…
Antihumanist narratives: Greed and Source Code
This essay explores specific, rare, antihumanist narrative possibilities in Hollywood cinema that occur in the early decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, signified by two films: Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011).1 We contend that these films, separated by almost a century, mark two moments in which the normative humanism of Hollywood has been penetrated: once by Naturalism and once by Code. Bo…
Simulation and Virtuality
The term “simulation” and its cognate “simulacrum” have a venerable history as the Latin translations of the Platonic eidolon . This is a copy of a copy, exemplified in Plato's Republic by a painting of a bed: The carpenter's bed is a copy of the Ideal, and the painter's is a copy of the carpenter's and so at a distant remove from the reality of the Idea. The term “virtual” is almost as ancient, traceable to the Aristotelian distinction between p…
Liquidity
Seventeen years later, I took down from the shelf Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), a book suddenly without a living author, which I had first read the year we moved to New Zealand. Esther Leslie’s book Liquid Crystals (2016) doesn’t reference Bauman but plays through a dialectical history of crystalline and fluid models of modernity that harmonizes with the older book, while Sean Redmond’s Liquid Space (2017) points toward the Baumanian …
Glitch
Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in seman…
Film, landscape and political aesthetics: Deseret
Irrevocably historical, landscape is already denatured before it is represented, a repository of history which becomes, in representation, a record of history’s erasure under the banner of natural beauty. Questioning key aesthetic concepts of human freedom and the autonomy of art in dialogue with Theodor Adorno and James Benning, this essay argues the significance of eco-critique for film (and by implication electronic media) studies as exemplary…
Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
Of the original sixty minutes of The Story of the Kelly Gang, shot by Charles Tait in 1906, only seventeen minutes remain, much of it in the poorest condition.The film records a moment of colonial rebellion, the wild Irishman Ned Kelly refusing the yoke of his imperial masters.Often referred to as the world's first feature film, The Kelly Gang is a triumph of realism.We see again animals, plants, and geology now buried under roads and buildings.T…
Integral Waste
It is not only the physical digital media that pile waste upon waste in an era of built-in obsolescence driven by over-production attempting to balance the falling rate of profit. Energy used in the manufacture, employment and recycling of devices belongs to a system where waste is not merely accidental but integral to the operation of cognitive capitalism. Oil and gas, uranium and hydroelectricity all prey disproportionately on indigenous people…
Enumerating Photography from Spot Meter to CCD
The transition from analogue to digital photography was not accomplished in a single step. It required a number of feeder technologies which enabled and structured the nature of digital photography. Among those traced in this article, the most important is the genesis of the raster grid, which is now hard-wired into the design of the most widely employed photographic chip, the charge-coupled device (CCD). In tracing this history from origins in h…
Ecomedia futures
Studies of environmentalism in media and cultural studies have largely focused on the communication of political strategies and scientific truths, on representation, and on genre and thematic criticism. This article looks at current work on the environmental impacts of digital media and argues that this gives a new perspective on political economy of communications, media ethics and aesthetic forms
Decolonizing Ecomedia
Ecocritical work on media has developed from a genre criticism of nature-themed films to address cinema, TV, and media arts more broadly as articulations of the human-natural relation and its mediation through technologies. Embracing the environmental impacts of product life cycles, from materials extraction and industrial production to energy use and recycling, these advances in ecocriticism have begun to address the differential experiences of …
Telecommunication Networks: Economy, Ecology, Rule
This essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the relation of the economics of growth, built-in obsolescence and product life cycles with the complex determinations of telecommunications governance in relation to the physical environment of megacities. It argues …
The Shadow
In both electronic scanning and film projection the image must disappear for fragments of every second. Where perspective rests on a vanishing point, projection relies on a vanishing instant, the sudden plunge into imperceptible darkness. This article traces the art history of the vanishing of the image in the history of shadow. For Plato, who wants to remove all trace of subjectivity and the doxa associated with it, shadows are evidence of the m…
Camera as Object and Process: An Interview with Victor Burgin
Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?' These works extend and develop Burgin's long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and…
Electric Light and Electricity
This paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture and political economy in the formation of the provision and use of electric light. The essay looks at the marketization of electric power, at outages in the eastern and western US megacities, at the collapse of the…
Reflections on medium specificity occasioned by the symposium 'Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation', Melbourne, 2011
Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue that both the 'post-medium condition' mooted by Krauss and the 'Death of Cinema' theses of film scholars like Rodowick and Mulvey miss critical issues in these transitions and over-emphasize others. We make the case that the…
Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
Of the original sixty minutes of The Story of the Kelly Gang, shot by Charles Tait in 1906, only seventeen minutes remain, much of it in the poorest condition.The film records a moment of colonial rebellion, the wild Irishman Ned Kelly refusing the yoke of his imperial masters.Often referred to as the world's first feature film, The Kelly Gang is a triumph of realism.We see again animals, plants, and geology now buried under roads and buildings.T…
Cyberfutures: Culture and politics on the information superhighway
Decolonizing Ecomedia
Ecocritical work on media has developed from a genre criticism of nature-themed films to address cinema, TV, and media arts more broadly as articulations of the human-natural relation and its mediation through technologies. Embracing the environmental impacts of product life cycles, from materials extraction and industrial production to energy use and recycling, these advances in ecocriticism have begun to address the differential experiences of …
Does cloud computing have a silver lining
Despite the language of immateriality and weightlessness, network communications have a significant materiality and weight when considered from the standpoint of production, consumption and recycling. In this paper, we concentrate on the energy signatures of the server industry on which internet communications depend, with special consideration of Google server farms. The move towards thin clients and cloud computing raises the stakes for the ser…
Glitch
Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in seman…
Electric Light and Electricity
This paper argues that cultural analyses of electric light, including aspects of actor-network theory, may raise the spectre of complexity, but do not do it justice when they omit to provide analysis of the intertwined roles of culture and political economy in the formation of the provision and use of electric light. The essay looks at the marketization of electric power, at outages in the eastern and western US megacities, at the collapse of the…
Postnormal network futures: A rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar
Distribution and Media Flows
While production, text and audience have been extensively covered by media and cultural studies scholars, the study of distribution is in its infancy. This essay argues that the distributive moment of the media cycle – incorporating delivery to audiences, business-to-business distribution and the redistribution of profits and information derived from audiences – is critical to an understanding of twenty-first-century cultural politics. It offers …
Maybellene: Meaning and the Listening Subject
There appeared in the summer of 1982 a song written and performed by three German structuralists, a song characterised by the simplicity - to the point of banality - of its musical structure and instrumentation. Intended as a critical intervention in the production of ordinariness in popular music, 'Da Da Da' reached number one in the British charts, and Trio's appearance on the British TV show, Top of the Pops, was no more threatening than that …
The distinctiveness of digital criticism
Screen 41(1), Spring 2000
Integral Waste
It is not only the physical digital media that pile waste upon waste in an era of built-in obsolescence driven by over-production attempting to balance the falling rate of profit. Energy used in the manufacture, employment and recycling of devices belongs to a system where waste is not merely accidental but integral to the operation of cognitive capitalism. Oil and gas, uranium and hydroelectricity all prey disproportionately on indigenous people…
Virtual Dialectics and Technological Aesthetics
Technology has in general been seen as opposed to humanity: its object, even its enemy. The Grundrisse suggests, however, that technology can be understood as the actualized form of accumulated social knowledge. This actual form can then be understood from the standpoint of a dialectic in which the actual is capable of action only if it can convert its actuality into virtuality, that is to free itself for a future other than its actual present. C…
Virilio and New Media
Virilio's work as commentator and critic of new media forms takes its inspiration from the urgent need for an ethical dimension to our accommodation of these media in already complex social formations. Although Virilio relies upon a Catholic humanist liberalism and, it is argued here, a very specific mode of philosophical individualism and although these premises govern and constrain the grounding of his ethical critique in a simplistic conceptua…
Turning disaster into crisis
This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities
Film, landscape and political aesthetics: Deseret
Irrevocably historical, landscape is already denatured before it is represented, a repository of history which becomes, in representation, a record of history’s erasure under the banner of natural beauty. Questioning key aesthetic concepts of human freedom and the autonomy of art in dialogue with Theodor Adorno and James Benning, this essay argues the significance of eco-critique for film (and by implication electronic media) studies as exemplary…
Enumerating Photography from Spot Meter to CCD
The transition from analogue to digital photography was not accomplished in a single step. It required a number of feeder technologies which enabled and structured the nature of digital photography. Among those traced in this article, the most important is the genesis of the raster grid, which is now hard-wired into the design of the most widely employed photographic chip, the charge-coupled device (CCD). In tracing this history from origins in h…
Camera as Object and Process: An Interview with Victor Burgin
Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?' These works extend and develop Burgin's long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and…
Media art futures
Telecommunication Networks: Economy, Ecology, Rule
This essay deals with technologies, techniques, business models and legal structures governing telecommunications infrastructures. Megacities are especially vulnerable to shifting agencies in telecoms provision. This paper addresses the relation of the economics of growth, built-in obsolescence and product life cycles with the complex determinations of telecommunications governance in relation to the physical environment of megacities. It argues …
Indigenous, Settler and Migrant Media
For indigenous, setller and migrant cultures, places operate very differently. Creating places in digital media is always a matter of transience for all three. This is not only a matter of the ephemerality of the medium. It concerns the relationship between the user and the artefact. The transient places created in digital media are not traditional, even when they draw on and place themselves in relation to tradition
Library
The modern library derives from a vision of public service developed in the 19th century. At various times in the past a commercial service, an educational resource, a religious domain and a political institution, the library today exists in various forms, including all these but in addition the professional libraries held by law firms and scientific or technological associations, multimedia lending libraries and certain areas of the world-wide w…
Analogue and Digital
This in an electronic, pre-publication version of an article published in Theory, Culture and Society, (c) 2006 Sage Publications. Reproduced with permission. For further information see http://tcs.sagepub.com
To transitory peace
Cultural studies increasingly looks across boundaries. This article looks at definitions of peace from a cultural studies perspective, suggesting that binary oppositions governing such fields as peace and war, individual and society, tradition and modernity offer few grounds for progress towards peace. The article suggests instead that the utopian principle of hope can be recruited for a culture of peace based on the surrender to difference, at a…
Slouching towards Bethlehem
Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, by Philip Hay ward and Tana Wollen (Eds), London: Arts Council of Great Britain/British Film Institute, 1993, 212 pages, £12.95 pb
Reply to Robins and Webster
Journal Article Reply to Robins and Webster Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 27, Issue 3-4, May-August 1986, Pages 46–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/27.3-4.46 Published: 01 May 1986
Maybellene: Meaning and the Listening Subject
There appeared in the summer of 1982 a song written and performed by three German structuralists, a song characterised by the simplicity - to the point of banality - of its musical structure and instrumentation. Intended as a critical intervention in the production of ordinariness in popular music, 'Da Da Da' reached number one in the British charts, and Trio's appearance on the British TV show, Top of the Pops, was no more threatening than that …
Box Pop
Journal Article Box Pop Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 26, Issue 2, March-April 1985, Pages 84–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/26.2.84 Published: 01 March 1985
Reply to Robins and Webster
Journal Article Reply to Robins and Webster Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 27, Issue 3-4, May-August 1986, Pages 46–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/27.3-4.46 Published: 01 May 1986
Cancelling Popular Culture
Cancelling Popular Culture Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 27, Issue 6, November-December 1986, Pages 90–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/27.6.90 Published: 01 November 1986
Postmodern, post-political, post caring
(1988). Postmodern, post-political, post caring? Cultural Studies: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 397-402
The Technological Relation
Journal Article The Technological Relation Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 29, Issue 2, Spring 1988, Pages 2–7, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.2.2 Published: 01 March 1988
Time Shift: Reflections on Video Viewing
Journal Article Time Shift: Reflections on Video Viewing Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 29, Issue 2, Spring 1988, Pages 74–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/29.2.74 Published: 01 March 1988
Video Art and Colonialism: An Other and Its Others
Journal Article Video Art and Colonialism: An Other and Its Others Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 30, Issue 4, Autumn 1989, Pages 66–79, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/30.4.66 Published: 01 October 1989
Retrato Hablado: The airmail paintings of Eugenio Dittborn
Signs of the Times: A Decade of Video, Film and Tape-slide Installations, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 7 October to 9 December 1990; and Electronic Visions, Harris Gallery, Preston, 1 November to 10 …
Journal Article Signs of the Times: A Decade of Video, Film and Tape-slide Installations, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 7 October to 9 December 1990; and Electronic Visions, Harris Gallery, Preston, 1 November to 10 December 1990 Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 32, Issue 2, Summer 1991, Pages 222–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.2.222 Published: 01 Ju…
Going native: Columbus, Liverpool, identity and memory
Beyond destination
Arabesques: Bashir Makhoul and the unfinished project of modernism
Some watchers of the skies
Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn, London: Verso, 1990, 231 pages, pb £11.95
V‐Topia
Dispersed visions: ‘About place’
Slouching towards Bethlehem
Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, by Philip Hay ward and Tana Wollen (Eds), London: Arts Council of Great Britain/British Film Institute, 1993, 212 pages, £12.95 pb
On Interpretation: Bill Viola's The Passing
Journal Article On Interpretation: Bill Viola's The Passing Get access Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 36, Issue 2, Summer 1995, Pages 113–130, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/36.2.113 Published: 01 July 1995
Three contemporary African artists
Online Sound and Virtual Architecture (Contribution to the Geography of Cultural Translation)
This article starts from the premise that communication is the fundamental human attribute. However, in contemporary conditions, the integrity of the message has taken precedence over the communicative. Exemplary instances are the cult of authenticity in recording engineering and the positioning of the auditor as end-user and focal point of stereophony. The essay uses Khan and de Rooy’s installation The Garden of A —to introduce a spatial and env…
Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women; Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age; J. P. Telotte, Replications: a Robotic History of…
Journal Article Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women; Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age; J. P. Telotte, Replications: a Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film Get access Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Anne Balsamo, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 219pp.Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Claudia Springer, Lon…
Cyberfutures: Culture and politics on the information superhighway
Orbis tertius
Keith piper: After resistance, beyond destiny
(1999). Keith piper: After resistance, beyond destiny. Third Text: Vol. 13, No. 47, pp. 77-86
Mediation and the future of distributed subjectivity
Art (48 works) · Sociology (46 works) · Computer Science (41 works) · Political science (34 works) · Art history (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Media studies (24 works) · Aesthetics (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works)