Sean Cubitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3693008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Cubitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Cubitt |
| SIGNATURE | CUBITT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. E-mail: <>. |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
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…
Third Text: 21. 1
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…
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…
Ecomedia: Key issues
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…
The tone of our times sound, sense, economy, and ecology: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology
Endless praise and sweet dissonance -- Acclamation -- Infinite noise -- Disaffected voices -- Resonance, anechoica, and noisy speech -- The racket -- Echoes of eco. "In this wide-ranging book, Frances Dyson examines the role of sound in the development of economic and ecological systems that are today in crisis. Connecting early theories of harmony, cosmology, and theological doctrine to contemporary media and governance, Dyson uses sound, tone, …
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…
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…
Postnormal network futures: A rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar
Social Formations of Global Media Art
The absence of an uninterrupted, lived tradition of critical inquiry into and artistic engagement with technology led to the spread of certain ideologies regarding media or digital media which can be characterised as determinist, instrumentalist and essentialist. Such discourses emerge not only in the myths of cypertopians, but in the practical policies of development projects. Offered as a magic bullet, new technologies have consistently failed …
Art, Technology and Policy in the Twenty‐First Century
21st century media are integral to the making, dissemination and business of art. They are also the infrastructure of neo-liberal globalisation. Artists and cultural activists can no longer ignore the technical workings of network media, nor how they are constructed politically in global and national policy forums. This article analyses the loss of integral governance as a result of the rise of neo-liberalism, the increased exclusion of the devel…
Leonardo Network News
December 01 2008 Leonardo Network News Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sean Cubitt Online Issn: 1531-4812 Print Issn: 0961-1215 © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2008 Leonardo Music Journal (2008) 18: 104–105. https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2008.18.104 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figur…
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
Catching the History of the Media Arts
October 01 2007 Catching the History of the Media Arts Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sean Cubitt Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2007 Leonardo (2007) 40 (5): 460–462. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2007.40.5.460 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Vie…
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…
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…
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
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 …
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…
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…
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
Retrato Hablado: The airmail paintings of Eugenio Dittborn
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
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…
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
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…
The ephemeral future of beauty: Art, amateurs and corporations in the 21st century
Simulation and Social Theory
Like the idea of ideology, simulation is a politial theory, but it has also become a deeply pessimistic theory of the end of history and the impossibility of positive change. Sean Cubitt argues for a critical and selective use of the concept
Interface culture
Simulation and social theory
Visual and audiovisual: From image to moving image
The apparently arcane question of whether an image can move reveals key difficulties concerning the tasks facing visual culture. Among them are the lack of attention to graphic and animated images, to cartography, spreadsheets and databases and other workplace media, and to the relations between image and sound, and image and text. The step from still image to moving image concerns especially the temporal dimension of human communication, a focus…
Leonardo Reviews
February 01 2002 Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp by DawnAdesNeilCox and DavidHopkins. Thames and Hudson, York and London, 1999. 224 pages, illus. $14.95 (paper). ISBN: 0-500-20322-9. Sean Cubitt Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sean Cubitt Screen and…
Computer Science (34 works) · Art (33 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (19 works) · Art history (17 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Politics (14 works)