Charlie Gere

Breaking the time barrier -- Morse's inventions -- The writing of Van Gogh -- Taking off -- John Cage's early warning system -- Art in real time -- Is it happening? -- Short films about flying -- Bibliography -- Index

Art, Time and Technology

From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere’s engaging volume. In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes. A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age. “This is an excellent book. It gives an almost complete overview of the main trends and view of what is generally called digital culture through the whole post-war period, as well as a thorough exposition of the history of the computer and its predecessors and the origins of the modern division of labor.”—Journal of Visual Culture

Digital Culture

Hazel Gardiner

Much as art history is in the process of being transformed by new information communication technologies, often in ways that are either disavowed or resisted, art practice is also being changed by those same technologies. One of the most obvious symptoms of this change is the increasing numbers of artists working in universities, and having their work facilitated and supported by the funding and infrastructural resources that such institutions offer. This new paradigm of art as research is likely to have a profound effect on how we understand the role of the artist and of art practice in society. In this unique book, artists, art historians, art theorists and curators of new media reflect on the idea of art as research and how it has changed practice. Intrinsic to the volume is an investigation of the advances in creative practice made possible via artists engaging directly with technology or via collaborative partnerships between practitioners and technological experts, ranging through a broad spectrum of advanced methods from robotics through rapid prototyping to the biological sciences.

Art Practice in a Digital Culture

Banka hesaplarımızdan süpermarketlere yapılan ödemelere, izlediğimiz filmlere kadar, birler ve sıfırların oluşturduğu diziler dünyamızı boğuyor. Dijital teknoloji, modern toplumu çeşitli biçimlerde tanımlamıştır ve şimdi ortaya çıkan canlı dijital kültür, Charlie Gere’in ilgi çekici çalışmasının konusudur. Facebook ve iPhone gibi yeni gelişmelerin de incelendiği gözden geçirilmiş ve genişletilmiş bu ikinci basımda, Charlie Gere sanat, müzik, sinema, edebiyat tasarım ve dijital teknolojilere gelen toplumsal karşılıkları dönüm noktası alarak dijital kültür tarihini detaylandırır. Dijital kültürün tarihsel gelişiminin izini süren Gere’ye göre dijital kültür aslında ne radikal anlamda yenidir ne de teknoloji tarafından yönlendirilen bir şeydir: dijital kültürün on sekizinci yüzyıla dayanan bir temeli vardır ve bugün içinde yüzdüğümüz dijital ortamlar, diğer kültürel değişimlerin yanı sıra temelde endüstriyel kapitalizmden kaynaklanan bilgi gereksinimlerinden, çağdaş savaş ve karşı kültür deneylerinden esinlenmiş durumdadır. Çağdaş sosyal altyapımızın güncel ve çarpıcı bir incelemesi olan Dijital Kültür, Dijital Çağımızın sürekli değişen geleceği hakkında endişe duyan herkes için çok önemlidir.

Dijital Kültür

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God

Unnatural Theology

An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past. I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects. Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe. In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.

Charlie Gere

About

Books

Join the club