Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2020 # Intelligence.  

  Edited by Patricia Pisters and Ruggero Eugeni.

The Artificial Intelligence of a Machine: Moving Images in the Age of Algorithms

This NECSUS Special Section #Intelligence, includes seven essays   addressing the impact of Artificial Intelligence on cinema and media from a   cultural perspective. More particularly, three levels of pertinence are focused. At a first level, selected papers analyse several representations of  non-human intelligence confronted with human one, as provided by film,  television series, and video games. At a second level, a set of mutual functioning dynamic between A.I. and the media are identified and scrutinised. Finally, the contributing authors consider how A.I. algorithms lead cinema and media theory to deeply rethink its assumptions about creating and viewing moving images.

Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters (eds.), Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (Continuum, 2012 forthcoming)

This volume assembles some of the most distinguished scholars in the field of Deleuze studies in order to provide both an accessible introduction to key concepts in Deleuze’s thought and to test them in view of the issue of normativity. This includes not only the law, but also the question of norms and values in the broader ethical, political and methodological sense. The volume argues that Deleuze’s philosophy rejects the unitary vision of the subject as a self-regulating rationalist entity and replaces it with a process-oriented relational vision of the subject. But what can we do exactly with this alternative nomadic vision? What modes of normativity are available outside the parameters of liberal, self-reflexive individualism on the one hand and the communitarian model on the other? This interdisciplinary volume explores these issues in three directions that mirror Deleuze and Guattari’s defense of the parallelism between philosophy, science, and the arts. The volume therefore covers socio-political and legal theory; the epistemological critique of scientific discourse and the cultural, artistic and aesthetic interventions emerging from Deleuze’s philosophy.

Deleuze Studies Vol. 6.1 (2012)

A Thousand Plateaus’ ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’ introduces smoothness and striation as a conceptual pair to rethink space as a complex mixture between nomadic forces and sedentary captures. Among the models Deleuze and Guattari describe for explicating where we encounter smooth and striated spaces, the maritime model presents the special problem of the sea. The sea is a smooth space par excellence: open water always moved by the wind, the sun and the stars, nomadically traversable by noise, colour and celestial bearings. Increased navigation of the open water resulted in demands for its striation. Although Deleuze and Guattari note that this took hold progressively, the year 1440, when Portuguese discoverers introduced the first nautical charts, marked a turning point in the striation of the sea. Maps with meridians, parallels, longitudes, latitudes and territories gridded the oceans, making distances calculable and measurable. It meant the beginning of the great explorations –and of the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of the European State apparatus. The smooth and the striated concern the political and politics. The authors in this volume think with art to shed new and interdisciplinary light upon the concepts of smoothness and striation, and, conversely, upon the way the smooth and the striated can give important insights into artistic practices. Contributions by Eric Alliez, Jay Hetrick, Colin Gardner, Tod Satter, Guy Keulemans, Charlotte Knox-Williams, Asli Özgen Tuncer, Zach Horton and Jean Hillier.

Download Introduction PDF

Edinburgh University Press for complete issue online  

Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven (eds), Mind the screen: Media concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2008) 376 pages

Mind the Screen pays tribute to Thomas Elsaesser, a pioneering and leading scholar in the field of film and media studies. The contributions present a close-up of media concepts developed by Elsaesser, providing a mirror for all types of audiovisual screens, from archaeological pre-cinematic screens to the silver screen, from the TV set to the video installation and the digital e-screen, and from the city screen to the mobile phone display. The book is divided into three 'Acts': Melodrama, Memory, Mind Game; Europe-Hollywood-Europe; and Archaeology, Avant-Garde, Archive.

This title is available in the OAPEN Library.

Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat (eds), Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values (Amsterdam University Press, 2005) 224 pages

Shooting the Family, a collection of essays on the contemporary media landscape, explores ever-changing representations of family life on a global scale. The contributors argue that new recording technologies allows families an unusual kind of freedom—until now unknown—to define and respond to their own lives and memories. Recently released videos made by young émigrés as they discover new homelands and resolve conflicts with their parents, for example, reverberate alongside the dark portrayals of family life in the formal filmmaking of Ang Lee. This book will be a boon to scholars of film theory and media studies, as well as to anyone interested in the construction of the family in a postmodern world.

Patricia Pisters (ed), Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition, 2002) 302 pages

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler's List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing ("in transition") in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Download the introduction as PDF (4.9 MB)
Download chapter 6: Glamour and Glycerine as PDF (3.1 MB)