Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman' begins with a comprehensive and original anthropological analysis of Vertov's film The Man With a Movie Camera. Tomas then explores the film's various aspects and contributions to media history...
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Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman' begins with a comprehensive and original anthropological analysis of Vertov's film The Man With a Movie Camera. Tomas then explores the film's various aspects and contributions to media history and practice through detailed discussions of selected case studies. The first concerns the way Snow's La Region Centrale and De La extend and/or develops important theoretical and technical aspects of Vertov's original film, in particular those aspects that have made the film so important in the history of cinema. The linkage between Vertov's film and the works discussed in the case studies will also serve to illustrate the historical and theoretical significance of a comparative approach of this kind, and illustrate the pertinence of adopting a 'relational approach' to the history of media
Introduction -- Threshold when a ritual process speaks of machine vision and cyborg prototypes: a film document, circa 1929 -- Manufacturing vision and the posthuman circa 1929: Kino-eye, The man with a movie camera, and the perceptual reconstruction of social identity -- Enigma of the central region. A microhistory of machine vision and posthuman consciousness, circa 1969-1972 -- Basic cultural, technical and formal filiations -- Toward a cosmic rite of passage: external & internal locations and a play of authorship -- Liminality, knowledge production, pedagogy -- From cosmic to posthuman rite of passage -- De La (1969-71): authorship, automation and the posthuman -- A comparative schematic analysis of the automated narrative and its mechanical logic in Vertov's The man with a movie camera (1929) and Michael Snow's De La (1969-1972) -- The public deployment of machine vision and the programmed materialization of the posthuman in collective social space -- Early twenty-first century video documents -- A posthuman future in the age of the algorithm: Farocki's documentation of the operational image and its culture of surveillance
