Overview

In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning-which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming-provides the means to reveal the ""analog"" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnes Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.

Full Product Details

9780822360025

Table of Contents

Reviews

Homay King is an astute observer of art, her analyses masterful and original. The book's project of redeploying the philosophical concept of the virtual toward a renewed understanding of time-based art is one of great importance for art theory and media studies, and is brought to fruition in these pages with interpretive skill and conceptual precision. --Brian Massumi, author of Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception

Homay King is an astute observer of art, her analyses masterful and original. The book's project of redeploying the philosophical concept of the virtual toward a renewed understanding of time-based art is one of great importance for art theory and media studies, and is brought to fruition in these pages with interpretive skill and conceptual precision. --Brian Massumi, author of Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception

Author Information

Homay King is Associate Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College and the author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, also published by Duke University Press. 

Tab Content 6

Countries Available