Tracing the connections—both visual and philosophical—between new media art and classical Islamic art. In both classical Islamic art and contemporary new media art, one point can unfold to reveal an entire universe. A fourteenth-century dome decorated with geometric complexity and a new media work that shapes a dome from programmed beams of light: both can inspire feelings of immersion and transcendence. In Enfoldment and Infinity, Laura Marks traces the strong similarities, visual and philosophical, between these two kinds of art. Her argument is more than metaphorical; she shows that the “Islamic” quality of modern and new media art is a latent, deeply enfolded, historical inheritance from Islamic art and thought. Marks proposes an aesthetics of unfolding and enfolding in which image, information, and the infinite interact: image is an interface to information, and information (such as computer code or the words of the Qur'an) is an interface to the infinite. After demonstrating historically how Islamic aesthetics traveled into Western art, Marks draws explicit parallels between works of classical Islamic art and new media art, describing texts that burst into image, lines that multiply to form fractal spaces, “nonorganic life” in carpets and algorithms, and other shared concepts and images. Islamic philosophy, she suggests, can offer fruitful ways of understanding contemporary art.

Black Screens, White Frames offers a new understanding of blank screens in cinema. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy and pursuing an affirmative approach to non-images through the concept of the filmmaking machine, author Tanya Shilina-Conte shows how absence can be a productive mode that alters the way we study film.

The internationally acclaimed films Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir only hinted at the vibrant animation culture that exists within the Middle East and North Africa. In spite of censorship, oppression and war, animation studios have thrived in recent years - in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Turkey - giving rise to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and artists. The success of animation in the Middle East is in part a product of a changing cultural climate, which is increasingly calling for art that reflects politics. Equally, the professionalization and popularization of film festivals and the emergence of animation studios and private initiatives are the results of a growing consumer culture, in which family-friendly entertainment is big business. Animation in the Middle East uncovers the history and politics that have defined the practice and study of animation in the Middle East, and explores the innovative visions of contemporary animators in the region.

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm—who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways—Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. Through analyses of fiction, documentary, and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. She shows that by affectively mediating with the ever-shifting folded relations within the cosmos, it is possible to build “soul-assemblages” that challenge information capitalism, colonialism, and other power structures and develop new connections with the infinite. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

Special Focus editor: Natasha Lushetich Series editors: Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer Symbolism is cohesive. It gathers heterogeneity over time, across fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology, appear dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being "is"; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as "the Eastern hill keeps running on the water"; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them. In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s "other." They catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, the para-logical and the meta-experiential, or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations. Forty years after Varela et al’s groundbreaking work on the embodied, emotional and environmentally embedded mind – that marked a definitive departure from its former strictly rational conception – there is a need to re-examine the territory that lies beyond mind for a different reason: the proliferation of algorithmic logics that rely on the idea of a rational agent (human or algorithmic) making logical, self-serving decisions. This special issue explores neither-rational-nor-irrational forms of thinking and making. It sketches a cartography of a-rational processes of meaning- and knowledge-production that operate across numerous sites, practices, and disciplines: visual and media art; literature; art history; music; dance; film; intermedia and photography. Part I "Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals" focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. Part II "Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds" investigates the ways in which the Derridian delays/detours and the Deleuzian folding function as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production. Part III, "Immanent Transcendence", offers a glimpse into the reticular and iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue.

Fractals suggest recursivity, infinity and the repetition of a principle of order. They are digital pictures of the universe's continuous movement ignored by mankind during millennia. This book investigates the relationship existing between geometries and technology, and how it guided cognitive processes and thus the organization of narrative spaces. The author proposes a new approach for the study of media remarking that from Bacon's camera obscura to von Neumann's computers both geometries and technology strongly influenced the organization of narrative spaces, which acquired a fractal character.

Highlights the industries, markets, identities, and histories that distinguish cinema beyond the traditional hubs of mainstream Western cinema. From Iceland to Iran, from Singapore to Scotland, a growing intellectual and cultural wave of production is taking cinema beyond the borders of its place of origin--exploring faraway places, interacting with barely known peoples, and making new localities imaginable. In these films, previously entrenched spatial divisions no longer function as firmly fixed grid coordinates, the hierarchical position of place as "center" is subverted, and new forms of representation become possible. In Cinema at the Periphery, editors Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal assemble criticism that explores issues of the periphery, including questions of transnationality, place, space, passage, and migration. Cinema at the Periphery examines the periphery in terms of locations, practices, methods, and themes. It includes geographic case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins, like New Zealand and Scotland, but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian "stateless" cinema, Australian Aboriginal films, and cinema from Quebec. Therefore, the volume is divided into two key areas: industries and markets on the one hand, and identities and histories on the other. Yet as a whole, the contributors illustrate that the concept of "periphery" is not fixed but is always changing according to patterns of industry, ideology, and taste. Cinema at the Periphery highlights the inextricable interrelationship that exists between production modes and circulation channels and the emerging narratives of histories and identities they enable. In the present era of globalization, this timely examination of the periphery will interest teachers and students of film and media studies.

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods. “Machine art” is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works by avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s. An art historical perspective, he argues, might change our views of recent works that seem to be driven by new media technologies but that in fact continue a century-old artistic exploration. Broeckmann investigates critical aspects of machine aesthetics that characterized machine art until the 1960s and then turns to specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy, looking in particular at the work of the Canadian artist David Rokeby; vision and image, and the advent of technical imaging; and the human body, using the work of the Australian artist Stelarc as an entry point to art that couples the machine to the body, mechanically or cybernetically. Finally, Broeckmann argues that systems thinking and ecology have brought about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology, which has brought with it a rethinking of human subjectivity. He examines a range of artworks, including those by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami, whose work exemplifies the shift.

This book offers a comprehensive, academic and detailed study of the works of James Cameron, whose films include successful productions such as the first two Terminator films (1984-91), Aliens (1986), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009), but also lesser known films such as Piranha 2: The Spawning (1981), The Abyss (1989), and True Lies (1994), and a series of documentaries on the depths of the ocean or on the tomb of Christ. Cameronʼs major productions have an immense and enduring popularity throughout the globe and have attracted both public and critical attention. This volume investigates several distinct areas of Cameronʼs works and addresses the different approaches and topics invited by the multidimensionality of the subject itself: the philosophical, the artistic, the socio-cultural and the personal. The methodologies adopted by the contributors differ significantly from each other, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of Cameronʼs oeuvre. Contrary to the numerous volumes published in the past on the subject, each chapter offers specific case studies that have been previously ignored, or only partially mentioned, by other scholars.

In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema.