Jeffrey L. Kosky
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226451060
- eISBN:
- 9780226451084
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226451084.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the ...
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The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the modern condition: the increasing capabilities of knowledge and science have banished mysteries, leaving a world that can be mastered technically and intellectually. And though this idea seems empowering, many people have faced modern disenchantment. Using intimate encounters with works of art to explore disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment, this book addresses questions about the nature of humanity, the world, and God in the wake of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity. It focuses on a handful of artists—Walter De Maria, Diller and Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldworthy—to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation. What might be thought of as religious longings, the book argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art. Developing a model of religion that might be significant to secular culture, it shows how this model can be employed to deepen interpretation of the art we usually view as representing secular modernity.Less
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the modern condition: the increasing capabilities of knowledge and science have banished mysteries, leaving a world that can be mastered technically and intellectually. And though this idea seems empowering, many people have faced modern disenchantment. Using intimate encounters with works of art to explore disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment, this book addresses questions about the nature of humanity, the world, and God in the wake of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity. It focuses on a handful of artists—Walter De Maria, Diller and Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldworthy—to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation. What might be thought of as religious longings, the book argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art. Developing a model of religion that might be significant to secular culture, it shows how this model can be employed to deepen interpretation of the art we usually view as representing secular modernity.
Amanda Boetzkes
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816665884
- eISBN:
- 9781452946450
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665884.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
This chapter examines artworks that place the spectator in an immersive situation. It explores the works of James Turrell, Chris Drury, and Olafur Eliasson, whose works are known for their earthen ...
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This chapter examines artworks that place the spectator in an immersive situation. It explores the works of James Turrell, Chris Drury, and Olafur Eliasson, whose works are known for their earthen enclosures or installations saturated by light and the use of colored filters and reflective mirrors. It investigates how their work offers unencumbered access to natural phenomena as they are structured to restrain the viewer at the threshold of elemental manifestations such as sky, light, atmosphere, water, and color. It also argues that the phenomenological positioning of the spectator, surrounded and separated at the same time from elementals, expresses a necessary withdrawal from earth that opens the senses to the dynamism and plenitude of earth.Less
This chapter examines artworks that place the spectator in an immersive situation. It explores the works of James Turrell, Chris Drury, and Olafur Eliasson, whose works are known for their earthen enclosures or installations saturated by light and the use of colored filters and reflective mirrors. It investigates how their work offers unencumbered access to natural phenomena as they are structured to restrain the viewer at the threshold of elemental manifestations such as sky, light, atmosphere, water, and color. It also argues that the phenomenological positioning of the spectator, surrounded and separated at the same time from elementals, expresses a necessary withdrawal from earth that opens the senses to the dynamism and plenitude of earth.
Douglas Kahn
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780520257801
- eISBN:
- 9780520956834
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520257801.003.0017
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Cinema is considered through electromagnetic propagation in projected and transmitted light in Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to listen to storms on the sun using his photophone; through the ...
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Cinema is considered through electromagnetic propagation in projected and transmitted light in Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to listen to storms on the sun using his photophone; through the “head-light child” of automobile headlights and related comet imagery by Marcel Duchamp, including his “tonsure”; and in Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, in the context of his ideas about electromagnetism.Less
Cinema is considered through electromagnetic propagation in projected and transmitted light in Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to listen to storms on the sun using his photophone; through the “head-light child” of automobile headlights and related comet imagery by Marcel Duchamp, including his “tonsure”; and in Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, in the context of his ideas about electromagnetism.
Douglas Kahn
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780520257801
- eISBN:
- 9780520956834
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520257801.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded ...
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Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded in the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing in telegraph lines and in the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard in telephone lines, the book moves through the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s, when the composer Alvin Lucier worked with the “natural electromagnetic sounds” present from “brainwaves to outer space,” through the urban electromagnetism in the conceptual art of Robert Barry, to the energy-scavenging drawings and antennas by the artist Joyce Hinterding. From the sounds of auroras at high latitudes and atmospheric electricity in the mountains to the underground music of earthquakes and nuclear explosions and to music bounced off the moon and the sounds of the sun, Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale through detailed discussions of artists and scientists such as Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Paul DeMarinis, Semiconductor, Thomas Ashcraft, Katie Paterson, Edmond Dewan, Ludwik Liszka, and many others.Less
Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded in the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing in telegraph lines and in the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard in telephone lines, the book moves through the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s, when the composer Alvin Lucier worked with the “natural electromagnetic sounds” present from “brainwaves to outer space,” through the urban electromagnetism in the conceptual art of Robert Barry, to the energy-scavenging drawings and antennas by the artist Joyce Hinterding. From the sounds of auroras at high latitudes and atmospheric electricity in the mountains to the underground music of earthquakes and nuclear explosions and to music bounced off the moon and the sounds of the sun, Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale through detailed discussions of artists and scientists such as Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Paul DeMarinis, Semiconductor, Thomas Ashcraft, Katie Paterson, Edmond Dewan, Ludwik Liszka, and many others.
Garrett Stewart
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226500874
- eISBN:
- 9780226501062
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226501062.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Exploring such various light artists as James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and especially Anthony McCall, this chapter concentrates on McCall’s work (in light of Hal Foster’s appreciation) in spanning the ...
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Exploring such various light artists as James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and especially Anthony McCall, this chapter concentrates on McCall’s work (in light of Hal Foster’s appreciation) in spanning the transition from filmic to digital projection in his “solid light films,” with their manifestation first of film without cinema, then of projection without image: not the representation of occupied narrative space but a habitable and embodied space of light all their own.Less
Exploring such various light artists as James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and especially Anthony McCall, this chapter concentrates on McCall’s work (in light of Hal Foster’s appreciation) in spanning the transition from filmic to digital projection in his “solid light films,” with their manifestation first of film without cinema, then of projection without image: not the representation of occupied narrative space but a habitable and embodied space of light all their own.
Michael Heim
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195104264
- eISBN:
- 9780197561690
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195104264.003.0012
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Virtual Reality
Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, ...
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Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.
Less
Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.
Barbara Maria Stafford
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226630489
- eISBN:
- 9780226630656
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226630656.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
We are entangled in an ineffable new reality that eludes representation. It can only be obliquely performed, not adequately spoken or described. From Robert Irwin’s and James Turrell’s radiant ...
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We are entangled in an ineffable new reality that eludes representation. It can only be obliquely performed, not adequately spoken or described. From Robert Irwin’s and James Turrell’s radiant installations to Jeff Wall’s semantically-elusive staged photographs, to the reign of unseen networks and concealed data structures, a fundamental incommensurability exists between making, imaging, and speech. In the wake of this shift into the elusive, this essay explores the desire to turn wordlessly wild by literally becoming a burrowing badger or a grazing goat. This preoccupation with achieving a transcendent oneness with a non-human agent reaches its apogee in downloading our sensing and affective capacities into a robot, that is, by sinking into a seductive technological object.Less
We are entangled in an ineffable new reality that eludes representation. It can only be obliquely performed, not adequately spoken or described. From Robert Irwin’s and James Turrell’s radiant installations to Jeff Wall’s semantically-elusive staged photographs, to the reign of unseen networks and concealed data structures, a fundamental incommensurability exists between making, imaging, and speech. In the wake of this shift into the elusive, this essay explores the desire to turn wordlessly wild by literally becoming a burrowing badger or a grazing goat. This preoccupation with achieving a transcendent oneness with a non-human agent reaches its apogee in downloading our sensing and affective capacities into a robot, that is, by sinking into a seductive technological object.
