Enfoldment and Infinity

An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10496135
AutoresK Scott (0000-0001-8360-3015)
Año2011
Volumen52
Número4
Páginas553-556
Fecha de publicación2011-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScreen (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0036-9543 • E-ISSN: 1460-2474
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/screen/hjr041
OpenAlexW2319910088
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas30

Media theorist Laura U. Marks argues convincingly in her new book, Enfoldment and Infinity: an Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, that an infinity of artistic forms arise from a unitary Kunstwollen, the ‘will of art’ elaborated by art historian Alöis Riegl. Marks is able to elaborate connections between such disparate art forms as ancient Islamic calligraphy and computer-generated vectors, Persian carpets and neobaroque films, and the pixillated digitality of modern technology and fana', the self-eclipsing ecstasy of Islamic mysticism. Although certainly distinct from one another, these examples bear traces of a common origin that manifests itself to discerning viewers. This book contributes to a growing field of scholarship on neobaroque elements in both classical Islamic and contemporary computer-generated art and media, which includes recent works by Timothy Murray, Angela Ndalianis, and Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.1 Marks enriches this discussion by introducing a valuable juxtaposition between the two artistic traditions that manages to explore their genealogical interaction without ignoring the different sociocultural and historical environments out of which they arose, or suggesting a teleological progression from one to the other

Art · Art history · Calligraphy · Genealogy · Infinity · Islam · Literature · Mysticism · Painting · Scholarship · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Media, Religion, Digital Communication