New posts to Scopic Regimes of Virtuality course blog

Rachel O’Reilly explores concepts of virtuality and (post-) modern machinic perception that emerge in Lauren Berlant’s article, ‘The Intuitionists’: History and the Affective Event.’ Vi Nguyen investigates the meaning of the Baroque by analyzing Gilles Deleuze’s ‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.’ Stephan Barmentloo examines aspects of visuality pertaining to the video game camera.

Machinic affectivity and virtualities of the historical present
Stream: Affect, Cognition, Perception

In this post, Rachel O’Reilly explores concepts of virtuality and (post-) modern machinic perception that emerge in Lauren Berlant’s article, ‘The Intuitionists’: History and the Affective Event.’ Five significant maneuvers in Berlant’s article are identified and examined:

1. Her consideration of technological assemblages as perceptual regimes affording knowledge of modernist perception
2. A concept of affect that differs in its politics from Massumi and Deleuze
3. Specific attention to the relationship of affect and virtuality to local fields of historicity and Bergsonian duree
4. A productive reworking of trauma theory that might be of relevance to media theorist’s considerations of affectivity and virtuality (and specifically relevant to this week’s engagement with Baudrillard)
5. Speculation on how it is possible to theorise the political and the historical oeuvre or shared moment through such aesthetic ‘case’ exemplars of affective singularity Read the rest of this entry »

What is Baroque?
Stream: Baroque Madness

In this post, Vi Nguyen investigates the meaning of the Baroque by analyzing Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Focillon and Deleuze maintain that the Baroque should be seen as an operative function rather than essence. Six characteristics of the Baroque are identified in order to keep the Baroque from becoming an ‘essence.’ In The Fold Deleuze presents a choreography between the subject and the world that is constituted through an infinite of folding. The concept of the fold, he argues, is both a structural and metaphorical attribute of the Baroque. Read the rest of this entry »

Visuality and the Video Game Camera
Stream: Politics of Virtual Space

In this post, Stephan Barmentloo examines the aspects of visuality pertaining to the video game camera. A shift has occurred from classic video games using non-optical perspectives towards contemporary video games often using optical perspectives. In the article ‘Cinematic Camera as Videogame Cliché,’ it is argued by David Thomas and Gary Haussmann that the video game camera mimics the cinematic camera. This view is contested by analyzing two machinima art works recently displayed at the DADAMACHINIMA exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »