Janet Harbord – författare

When Marcel Duchamp shipped Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Bird in Space to Edward Steichen in 1926, New York customs officials refused to accept that it was a work of art, instead levying the standard import tariff for a manufactured object. A legal battle ensued, with the courts eventually declaring Bird in Space an artwork and therefore exempt from the tariff. Seventy-eight years later, visitors to Simon Starling's exhibition at New York's Casey Kaplan Gallery were confronted with Staling's own Bird in Space (2004): a two-ton slab of steel from Romania (Brancusi's country of origin) leaning against the gallery wall and propped up on three inflatable cushions. The United States had recently introduced a new import tax of twenty per cent on foreign metals, which Starling circumvented by labelling this unaltered chunk of European steel a work of art. Its plinth of cushioned air not only introduced a second, more representational valance to the work but also brought to bear the traditional sculptural parameters of weight, gravity and balance. Starling's art frequently traffics in deception. It also traffics in traffic, meaning the circulation of goods, knowledge and people (usually the artist himself).  Many of his works circle back on themselves, taking an idea on a journey that ends at its point of origin. Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006), for example, is an elaborate helical steel structure designed to loop a thirty-five-millimetre film of the workshop in which it was fabricated. The circuitous path that the film takes through the towering metal structure is the perfect visual metaphor for the work's own circular logic, a self-regulating system that adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. Starling is a key figure in one of contemporary art's most significant recent developments: the linking of artistic practice and knowledge production. Although this tendency flourished with Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, in recent years it has taken on a new intensity. Unlike the Conceptual artists, however, many of whom strove for a language-based dematerialized art, for Starling the object is always at the work's heart. Economies, ecologies, coincidences and convergences are all simply means to an end - although 'simply' may be the wrong word to describe the transformation of thousands of miles of travel and hundreds of years of history into a single sculpture, film or photograph. Starling's other predecessors are the Land artists, such as Robert Smithson, with whom he shares a fascination with entropy and other natural forces. But he is truly an artist of the current age, setting out to understand and illustrate the complex processes through which the natural and human-made realms interact. The five platinum/palladium prints that constitute One Ton (2005) show a single view of a South African platinum mine. Together the five prints contain the precise amount of platinum salts that can be derived from one ton of ore, succinctly illustrating the enormous amount of energy required in the extraction of precious metals. Born in England in 1967 and now living in Denmark, Starling has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2011), Kunstmuseum Basel (2005) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2002), and his work has been featured in major international group shows, such as the Venice Biennale (2009), the Moscow Biennial (2007) and the São Paulo Biennial (2005).  Awards include the Turner Prize (2005), the Blinky Palermo Prize (1999) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (1999). In the Survey, Dieter Roelstraete presents a comprehensive overview of Starling's work, examining circularity and serendipity and the their relationship to historical research. For the Interview, Francesco Manacorda and the artist discuss the central role of time in his work. Janet Harbord's Focus scrutinizes Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006) as an example of material cinema. Artist's Choice is a extract from Flann O'Brien's 1996 novel The Third Policeman, a fantastical conversation about bicycles swapping atoms with their riders. Artists Writings include five project statements, all of which consist, in varying proportions, of history, science and speculative fiction.

How is film changing? What does it do, and what do we do with it? This book examines the reasons why we should be studying film in the twenty-first century, connecting debates from philosophy, anthropology and new media with historical concerns of film studies. When the common frameworks for studying film – the nation, identity, representation, Hollywood industry – have ceased to yield explanatory power, how do we conceive of film’s doings? In this fresh and innovative book, Janet Harbord argues that film no longer represents or stands in for particular cultures, but acts isomorphically, showing us how the world works. Film here is action, energy, matter, moving across space to forge connections, provide encounters, and create schisms in our knowledge of others. The book brings together key thinkers of the contemporary in an innovative exchange between film and theory. Marc Auge’s concept of ‘non-place’ is brought to bear on, and disrupt, the category of national cinema. Manuel DeLanda’s notion of morphogenesis frames an understanding of film as a process of constant evolution, in which the terms of change are immanent to matter itself. And the concept of inertia, from Paul Virilio’s work, allows us to comprehend the different energies of film. Arguing that there is no higher position from which to view the present, either in theory or in film, we move blindly and yet with faith, discovering the present frame by frame. The Evolution of Film demonstrates how this is an intangible yet critical medium in the contemporary, mediating relationships to place, technology and thought itself.The Evolution of Film will be essential reading for students and scholars of film at all levels.

How is film changing? What does it do, and what do we do with it? This book examines the reasons why we should be studying film in the twenty-first century, connecting debates from philosophy, anthropology and new media with historical concerns of film studies. When the common frameworks for studying film – the nation, identity, representation, Hollywood industry – have ceased to yield explanatory power, how do we conceive of film’s doings? In this fresh and innovative book, Janet Harbord argues that film no longer represents or stands in for particular cultures, but acts isomorphically, showing us how the world works. Film here is action, energy, matter, moving across space to forge connections, provide encounters, and create schisms in our knowledge of others. The book brings together key thinkers of the contemporary in an innovative exchange between film and theory. Marc Auge’s concept of ‘non-place’ is brought to bear on, and disrupt, the category of national cinema. Manuel DeLanda’s notion of morphogenesis frames an understanding of film as a process of constant evolution, in which the terms of change are immanent to matter itself. And the concept of inertia, from Paul Virilio’s work, allows us to comprehend the different energies of film. Arguing that there is no higher position from which to view the present, either in theory or in film, we move blindly and yet with faith, discovering the present frame by frame. The Evolution of Film demonstrates how this is an intangible yet critical medium in the contemporary, mediating relationships to place, technology and thought itself.The Evolution of Film will be essential reading for students and scholars of film at all levels.

"Film Cultures is thought-provoking and challenging. By opening film theory up to the many simultaneous networks of relation (that is, the cultures) of film, it asks both viewer and student to take film more seriously." - Communication Research Trends

"Film Cultures weaves together insights from cultural theory and film studies to provide a complex and absorbing theoretical account of contemporary film culture. Harbord writes with authority, imagination and wit and her delicate deployment of modernist and postmodernist cultural accounts makes rewarding reading." - Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow

Film Cultures argues that our tastes for film connect us to social, spatial and temporal networks of exchange and meaning. Whether we view film in the multiplex, arthouse or the gallery, as cinema premiere, video hire or from a cable channel, whether we approach film as a singular object or a hypertext linked to ancillary products, our relationship to film is inhabiting a culture. Shifting the focus of film analysis from the text to paths of circulation, Film Cultures questions how film connects us to social status, and national and global affiliations.

"Film Cultures is thought-provoking and challenging. By opening film theory up to the many simultaneous networks of relation (that is, the cultures) of film, it asks both viewer and student to take film more seriously." - Communication Research Trends

"Film Cultures weaves together insights from cultural theory and film studies to provide a complex and absorbing theoretical account of contemporary film culture. Harbord writes with authority, imagination and wit and her delicate deployment of modernist and postmodernist cultural accounts makes rewarding reading." - Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow

Film Cultures argues that our tastes for film connect us to social, spatial and temporal networks of exchange and meaning. Whether we view film in the multiplex, arthouse or the gallery, as cinema premiere, video hire or from a cable channel, whether we approach film as a singular object or a hypertext linked to ancillary products, our relationship to film is inhabiting a culture. Shifting the focus of film analysis from the text to paths of circulation, Film Cultures questions how film connects us to social status, and national and global affiliations.

Threading an enquiry through debates in neurodiversity scholarship and disability studies as well as film theory, this open access book challenges the widespread idea that autism is an epidemic characterised predominantly by a deficit of empathy, arguing that the reverse is true: we are living through an empathy epidemic in which autism is the outcast. In 1908, the British psychologist, Edward Titchener, translated the German term Einfühlung into the English language as ‘empathy’, around the same time that Eugen Bleuler coined the term ‘autism’ for a group of symptoms subset to an emerging classification of schizophrenia. Empathy became a useful tool to describe relations between people in a clinical context, but in the process of its incorporation into psychology, it shed its rich sensory meaning from Einfühlung as ‘feeling-into’ weather systems, architectural forms, and artworks. A remarkable reversal takes place in the first part of the twentieth century whereby empathy becomes an intra-human ethical act, and autism emerges as its inverse. Digging up and examining the buried relation between autism with an earlier form of ‘empathy’, this book argues that autism, like cinema, models an ethical apprehension of the more-than-human world.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Threading an enquiry through debates in neurodiversity scholarship and disability studies as well as film theory, this open access book challenges the widespread idea that autism is an epidemic characterised predominantly by a deficit of empathy, arguing that the reverse is true: we are living through an empathy epidemic in which autism is the outcast. In 1908, the British psychologist, Edward Titchener, translated the German term Einfühlung into the English language as ‘empathy’, around the same time that Eugen Bleuler coined the term ‘autism’ for a group of symptoms subset to an emerging classification of schizophrenia. Empathy became a useful tool to describe relations between people in a clinical context, but in the process of its incorporation into psychology, it shed its rich sensory meaning from Einfühlung as ‘feeling-into’ weather systems, architectural forms, and artworks. A remarkable reversal takes place in the first part of the twentieth century whereby empathy becomes an intra-human ethical act, and autism emerges as its inverse. Digging up and examining the buried relation between autism with an earlier form of ‘empathy’, this book argues that autism, like cinema, models an ethical apprehension of the more-than-human world.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

"Film Cultures is thought-provoking and challenging. By opening film theory up to the many simultaneous networks of relation (that is, the cultures) of film, it asks both viewer and student to take film more seriously." - Communication Research Trends

"Film Cultures weaves together insights from cultural theory and film studies to provide a complex and absorbing theoretical account of contemporary film culture. Harbord writes with authority, imagination and wit and her delicate deployment of modernist and postmodernist cultural accounts makes rewarding reading." - Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow

Film Cultures argues that our tastes for film connect us to social, spatial and temporal networks of exchange and meaning. Whether we view film in the multiplex, arthouse or the gallery, as cinema premiere, video hire or from a cable channel, whether we approach film as a singular object or a hypertext linked to ancillary products, our relationship to film is inhabiting a culture. Shifting the focus of film analysis from the text to paths of circulation, Film Cultures questions how film connects us to social status, and national and global affiliations.

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.

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.