This essay explores the 'structure of feeling' that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalisation and the financialisation of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal (...) strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The article traces these changes, focusing on three recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones's song 'Corporate Cannibal'; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate , starring Asia Argento; and Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales , featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson and other pop culture celebrities. (shrink)

Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia is a landmark work of postsocialist cinema. The film is a study in violent contrasts. It is viscerallycharged and icily allegorical; intimately physical in its exploration ofmasculine desire and bodily disgust, and sardonically distanced in its satiricalportrayal of the successive social and political regimes that dominatedHungary over the course of the twentieth century. On the one hand,Taxidermia is a highly controlled, severely formalist film. In its nearlyinhuman detachment, and its rigorously schematic organization, it is assevere as anything (...) by Kubrick. Yet at the same time, it is filled withuncomfortable and unpredictable details; and it insistently focuses onexcesses of the flesh in a way that rivals early Cronenberg. In what follows, Iconsider Taxidermia in the light of these contradictory extremes. (shrink)

Preface The Cinematic Body is a transversal, exploratory work, one that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and seeks to engage new currents in critical ...

Résumé Nous vivons au sein de multiples formes de vies intriquées entre elles. Végétaux, animaux, humains, nous passons notre temps à devoir traduire ces formes de vies entre elles, ce qui nous oblige à inventer des équivalents pour ce qui n’a pas d’équivalent, à forcer un échange entre des incommensurables. C’est au sein de ce travail vital de traduction que doivent être envisagés les médias.

Deleuze and Whitehead are both centrally concerned with the problem of how to reconcile the emergence of the New with the evident continuity and uniformity of the world through time. They resolve this problem through the logic of what Deleuze calls ‘double causality’, and Whitehead the difference between efficient and final causes. For both thinkers, linear cause-and-effect coexists with a vital capacity for desire and decision, guaranteeing that the future is not just a function of the past. The role of (...) desire and decision can be seen in recent developments in biology. (shrink)