Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age

Description

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such. Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Jihoon Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea, after teaching in the Division of Broadcast and Cinema Studies at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His essays have appeared in Screen, Film Quarterly, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and the anthologies Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (2010), and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011), among others.

What is a moving image? Through close analyses of a stunning range of post-media moving-image artists, Jihoon Kim assesses and reworks forty years of debate on medium specificity, formal abstraction, recycled footage, image processing and installation aesthetics. The resulting critiques of convergent and discrete media, ontologies of the image, and the role of art in the communicative epoch we are now entering have profound implications not just for the media arts but for art and media in the 21st century. * Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK * Between Film, Video, and the Digital is a paramount important transdisciplinary study of contemporary media fusion under the sign of technologically advanced processing of moving images and images of motion. It dismantles the identity of a medium as essentially hybrid and draws on an impressive array of art works since the 1990's that reconfigure and interlace experimental cinema, video installation, and digital animation. Jihoon Kim's in-depth comparative analysis of intermedial properties and aesthetic appearances of still and moving images reveals multiple and diverse conditions of today's visual media in flexible, fluid, and in-between forms. Transversing the narrow meanings of both 'medium specificity' and 'post-media' in media and film studies and art criticism where disciplinary discourse aims to establish borders, this book insists on hybridity as key concept for a comprehensive critical theory of artistic practices that is needed when we want to understand all possible forms of vision and visuality in moving images. * Yvonne Spielmann, Professor of Media Studies, The University of the West of Scotland, UK; author of Video. The Reflexive Medium and Hybrid Culture: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West * Through the lenses of hybridity, this book provides a novel approach to post-cinema. Page after page, we discover a territory where medium specificity dissolves, but the pleasure of moving images increases. Passionate and informed, this book leads us on an unexpected journey. * Francesco Casetti, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies, Yale University, USA *