Mark Hansen

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was described by Paul Ricoeur as 'the greatest of the French phenomenologists'. The essays in this volume examine the full scope of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from his central and abiding concern with the nature of perception and the bodily constitution of intentionality to his reflections on science, nature, art, history, and politics. The authors explore the historical origins and context of his thought as well as its continuing relevance to contemporary work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, biology, art criticism and political and social theory. What emerges is a fresh image of Merleau-Ponty as a deep and original thinker whose philosophical importance has been underestimated, in part owing to the influence of intellectual movements such as existentialism and structuralism, into which his work could not be easily assimilated. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Merleau-Ponty currently available.

In New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the "digital image" encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable, he places the body in a privileged position -- as the agent that filters information in order to create images. By doing so, he counters prevailing notions of technological transcendence and argues for the indispensability of the human in the digital era.Hansen examines new media art and theory in light of Henri Bergson's argument that affection and memory render perception impure -- that we select only those images precisely relevant to our singular form of embodiment. Hansen updates this argument for the digital age, arguing that we filter the information we receive to create images rather than simply receiving images as preexisting technical forms. This framing function yields what Hansen calls the "digital image." He argues that this new "embodied" status of the frame corresponds directly to the digital revolution: a digitized image is not a fixed representation of reality, but is defined by its complete flexibility and accessibility. It is not just that the interactivity of new media turns viewers into users; the image itself has become the body's process of perceiving it.To illustrate his account of how the body filters information in order to create images, Hansen focuses on new media artists who follow a "Bergsonist vocation"; through concrete engagement with the work of artists like Jeffrey Shaw, Douglas Gordon, and Bill Viola, Hansen explores the contemporary aesthetic investment in the affective, bodily basis of vision. The book includes over 70 illustrations from the works of these and many other new media artists

Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical, they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that cannot avoid the task of accounting for its unthematizable infrastructural condition. Tracing the oscillation constitutive of such a hermeneutics as it serves variously to constitute media theory in the work of critics from McLuhan to Kittler, from Leroi-Gourhan to Stiegler, my interrogation ultimately conceptualizes the medium as an environment for life:by giving concrete form to ‘epiphylogenesis’, concrete media find their most ‘originary’ function not as artifacts but via their participation in human technogenesis.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 54-82 [Access article in PDF] Seeing With The Body The Digital Image In Postphotography Mark B. N. Hansen In a well-known scene from the 1982 Ridley Scott film Bladerunner, Rick Deckard scans a photograph into a 3-D rendering machine and directs the machine to explore the space condensed in the two-dimensional photograph as if it were three-dimensional [see fig. 1]. Following Deckard's commands to zoom in and to pan right and left within the image space, the machine unpacks the "real" three-dimensional world represented by the two-dimensional photograph [see figs. 2-3]. After catching a glimpse of his target—a fugitive replicant—reflected from a mirror within the space, Deckard instructs the machine to move around behind the object obstructing the two-dimensional photographic view of the replicant and to frame what it sees [see figs. 4-5]. Responding to the print command issued by Deckard, the machine dispenses a photograph of the replicant which is, quite literally, a close-up of an invisible—indeed nonexistent—part of the two-dimensional original [see fig. 6]. And yet, following the fantasy of this scene, this impossible photograph is—or would be—simply the image of one particular data point within the data set comprising this three-dimensional data space. As fascinating as it is puzzling, this scene of an impossible rendering—a rendering of two-dimensional data as a three-dimensional space—can be related to the crisis brought to photography by digitization in two ways. On the one hand, in line with the film's thematic questioning of photography as a reliable index of memory, this scene foregrounds the technical capacity of digital processing to manipulate photographs. In this way, it thematizes the threat posed by digital technologies to traditional indexical notions of photographic realism. On the other hand, in what has turned out to be a far more prophetic vein, the scene presents a radically new understanding of the photographic image as a three-dimensional "virtual" space. Such an understanding presupposes a vastly different material existence of the photographic image: instead of a physical inscription of light on sensitive paper, the photograph has become a data set that can be rendered in various ways and thus viewed from various perspectives.The first position corresponds to the arguments made by William Mitchell in his now classic book, The Reconfigured Eye. In a comprehensive analysis of the techniques and possibilities of digital imaging, Mitchell concentrates on demarcating the traditional photographic image from its digital doppelgänger. While the specter of manipulation has always haunted the photographic image, it remains the exception rather than the rule: "There is no doubt that extensive reworking of photographic images to produce seamless transformations and combinations is technically difficult, time-consuming, and outside the mainstream of photographic practice. When we look at photographs we presume, unless we have some clear indications to the contrary, that they have not been reworked" [Mitchell 7]. To buttress this claim, Mitchell sketches three criteria for evaluating traditional photographic images: (1) does the image follow the conventions of photography and seem internally coherent? (2) does the visual evidence it presents [End Page 54]Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="33" />Click for larger viewFigure 1Still from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space.Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="32" />Click for larger viewFigure 2Still from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space.Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="33" />Click...

"My aim in this paper is to develop an ontology of media operations that is rooted in Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. I position this media operative ontology in contrast to Bernhard Siegert’s understanding of operative ontology as a cultural technique. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan, and Michel Serres, I argue that Siegert’s position compromises the extra-cultural operationality of technical media, and of techniques more generally, in its bid to redirect media theory from its Kittlerian trajectory. With his theory of information as reception of environmental singularity by a metastable receiver, Simondon provides a mechanism for theorizing how extra-cultural operationality of technical media informs the production of culture and the distinctions upon which it rests, without compromising the alterity of technics. Mein Ziel in diesem Beitrag ist es, eine Ontologie von Medienoperationen zu entwickeln, die auf Gilbert Simondons Theorie der Individuation fußt. Auf der Grundlage von Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan und Michel Serres behaupte ich, dass Siegerts Versuch, die Medientheorie von ihrer Kittlerschen Linie abzulenken, den Stellenwert der außerkulturellen Operationalität technischer Medien und der Techniken im Allgemeinen herabspielt. Mit seiner Theorie der Information als Empfang von umweltlicher Singularität durch einen metastabilen Empfänger bietet Simondon dagegen einen Mechanismus, dank dem theoretisch durchdacht werden kann, wie die außerkulturelle Operationalität der technischen Medien die Kulturproduktion und die Unterscheidungen, auf denen sie beruht, prägt, ohne die Andersheit der Technik zu reduzieren. "

This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time. The `digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as `the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference — a minimal before-after structure — that proves useful for exploring how the experience of time has changed today. The article argues that we increasingly live time not, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues, through neo-Husserlian temporal objects like the cinema that model the flow of time through our consciousnesses, but rather with the aid of artworks that eschew the objectal in favor of the processual. In works like Wolfgang Staehle's Empire 24/7, Pierre Huyghe's L'Ellipse and Lynn Kirby's Six Shooter, we confront open-ended digital structures that provide us with a technically-specific mediation of the minimal before-after structure and allow us to participate in more heterogeneous enframings of time that move beyond the temporal ratios of human perception. The article closes with a brief discussion of contemporary Chinese art that serves to broaden the proposed `digital aesthetic' of time beyond the `digital' construed narrowly as a concrete technical platform.

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? _Releasing the Image_ understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.

Drawing on American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce›s »phaneroscopy«, and particularly on its point of disjunction from more orthodox phenomenology concerning the status and necessity of reception, this article argues that today’s databases phenomenalize the aesthetic dimension of worldly sensibility. Although database phenomenalizing explicitly substitutes for the phenomenalizing performed by consciousness on standard accounts of phenomenology, the important point is that it does so without severing contact with human experience. What is ultimately at stake here is the status of the phenomenon itself: insofar as it hosts the self-manifestation of the world without necessarily manifesting it to anyone or anything, the phenomenon can be disjoined from its subjective anchoring in consciousness (or any of its avatars) and ascribed to the operationality of worldly sensibility itself. Gestützt auf die sog. »phaneroscopy« des amerikanischen Philosophen Charles Sanders Peirce und insbesondere auf ihre Differenz zur orthodoxeren Phänomenologie in Bezug auf den Status und die Notwendigkeit der Rezeption argumentiert dieser Beitrag, dass die heutigen Datenbanken die ästhetische Dimension weltlicher Sinnlichkeit phänomenalisieren. Auch wenn die Phänomenalisierung durch Datenbanken diejenige durch Bewusstsein explizit ersetzt, bleibt es bedeutsam, dass dies geschieht, ohne den Kontakt mit menschlicher Erfahrung abzubrechen. Worum es letztlich geht, ist der Status des Phänomens selbst: Insoweit es die Selbst-Manifestation der Welt beherbergt, ohne sie notwendigerweise für irgendjemand oder irgendetwas zu manifestieren, kann das Phänomen von seiner subjektiven Verankerung im Bewusstsein (oder jedem seiner Avatare) gelöst werden und der Operationalität weltlicher Sensibilität selbst zugeschrieben werden.