Invisibility Studies
Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the Author
- About the Book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Negotiating (In)Visibilities in Contemporary Culture: A Short Introduction
- Transparency, Refraction and Opacity
- Urban Topography, Void and Display
- Surfaces, Secrets and Interior Spaces
- Screens, Cameras and Surveillance
- The Emergence of an Interdisciplinary Field
- PART I Transparency, Refraction and Opacity
- Prelude I
- 1 Glass Glimpsed: In, On, Through and Beyond
- A Metaphysics of Glass
- A Poetics of Glass
- A Climatics of Glass
- Windows as Mirrors
- Window and Mirror: The Gradual and the Dual
- Bibliography
- 2 Mirroring the Invisible
- Mirror and Image
- The Extension of Light and Mirror Spectra
- Liquid Mirrors: Art and Commerce, Nature and Architecture
- Bibliography
- 3 ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’: Transparency, Voyeurism and Glass Architecture
- Reviving Modernist Transparency
- Cracking Transparency
- Bibliography
- 4 Transparency: Effable and Ineffable
- Space and the Projective Subject
- Klein Square 1
- Klein Square 2
- Conclusion: The Invisible Trace of the Transparent
- Bibliography
- PART II Urban Topography, Void and Display
- Prelude II
- 5 Mendelsohn and Libeskind: A Hidden History – Jewish Identity, the Void, Architectural Metaphors and Traces through Twentieth-Century Berlin
- Bibliography
- 6 Urban Bottles and Green Glass: Display and Transparencies in Post-Industrial Tuborg
- Diversified Visualities
- Variation on Bottles: Tuborg – a Beer and an Urban Threshold
- Variation on Bottles: The Urban Thermos – From Beer to Coffee
- Variation on Glass: Apartments with a View
- Variation on Glass: Transparency and Visibilities
- Variation on Bottles: Red and Green – From Harbour to Marina
- Variation on Bottles: White Yachts, Blue Waters – But No Benches on the Boardwalk
- Variation on Glass: Reflections in Green with Still Life
- Variation on Bottles: A Green Urban Icon
- Variation on Glass: A Panorama of Urban Times
- Exit: Perspectives for the City
- Bibliography
- 7 Spaces of Difference, Different Spaces: A Study of Urban Transformations in an Old Paint Factory
- Unpacking Lefebvre
- Production of Space at the Factory
- The Void
- PB43
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- 8 Negotiating (In)Visibilities in German Memory Culture
- Christian Boltanski, The Missing House and The Museum
- Stih and Schnock, Places of Remembrance
- Gunter Demnig, Stolpersteine
- Acknowledgement
- Bibliography
- Websites
- PART III Surfaces, Secrets and Interior Spaces
- Prelude III
- 9 Surface Encounters: On Being Centred, Decentred and Recentred by the Works of Do-Ho Suh
- Biography as a Device that Centres, Decentres and Recentres
- A Replica of a Replica of a Replica …
- Between the Outside of the Inside and the Inside of the Outside
- Bibliography
- 10 The Secret Suburb: Second Lives in Second Homes
- Development of Danish Holiday Home Areas
- Historical Development: Two Suburbs
- The Qualities of the Summerhouse
- Second Lives
- The Free Modern Life: An Illusion?
- Bibliography
- 11 Cool Critique Versus Hot Spectatorship: Jelinek/Haneke’s Voyeur around Vienna, a Return
- Critical Spectatorship: Die Klavierspielerin
- Mimetic Spectatorship? Haneke’s Collaborative Voyeurs
- Critical Repetitions? Pornography’s Reproduction and the (Re)turns of Drive
- Conclusion: Hot Critique
- Bibliography
- 12 Visions of Punishment: On Susan Crile’s Abu Ghraib Drawings
- Chalk
- Theatres of Shame
- Seeing and Feeling
- Circulating Bodies and Images
- Bibliography
- PART IV Screens, Cameras and Surveillance
- Prelude IV
- 13 To See the World as It Appears: Vision, the Gaze and the Camera as Technological Eye
- The Vision and the Gaze
- A Brief Introduction
- A New Reality?
- Phenomenology as a Way to Discover Realities
- To See the World as It Appears
- The Camera as Technological Eye: Seeing the World Through a Camera Lens
- The Gaze as Producer of Shame or Integration into the World?
- The Camera and the Creational Act
- Bibliography
- 14 Vanishing Surveillance: Ghost-Hunting in the Ubiquitous Surveillance Society
- Vanishing Surveillance
- Ghost-Hunting in the Ubiquitous Surveillance Society
- Bibliography
- 15 The Invisibilities of Internet Censorship
- Digital Censorship
- Invisible Infrastructures
- What is Digital Censorship?
- The New Censoring Actors
- Interventionist Digital Censorship
- Structural Digital Censorship
- Conclusion: On Conspiracy, Invisibility and Censorship
- Bibliography
- 16 Visible in Theory: Perceived Visibility as Symbolic Form – A Photo-Expedition into a Contemporary Urban Environment
- Ørestaden, a New Urban Environment in Copenhagen
- The Panopticon: Surveying the Field
- Imagined Transparency: Screen Reflections
- Black Box – Into the Camera
- Visible in Theory: Towards a Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Series Index
← viii | ix → Illustrations
PART I
Credit: zURBS (Nina Lund Westerdahl)
CHAPTER 1
Fig. 1.1: Laurence Whistler, The Overflowing Landscape
Credit: The Estate of Laurence Whistler
CHAPTER 3
Fig. 3.1: VALIE EXPORT, Silja Tillner, Transparent Cube
Fig. 3.2: Monica Bonvicini, Don’t Miss A Sec’
Credit: Jannes Linders © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
CHAPTER 4
Fig. 4.1: Space and the projective subject: the subject …
PART II
CHAPTER 5
Fig. 5.1: Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns
Credit: Stih and Schnock, Berlin/VG BildKunst, Bonn/Berlin/ARS, New York City
← ix | x → Fig. 5.2: Christian Boltanski with Christiane Büchner and Andreas Fischer, The Missing House
Fig. 5.3: Daniel Libeskind, Matrix of the star
Fig. 5.4: Berlin-Kreuzberg, Berlin Museum and its environment
Fig. 5.5: Second Friedrichstadt extension by Philip Gerlach, ‘Grund-Riss’
Credit: DAM (German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt)
Credit: Bruno Zevi, Erich Mendelsohn, Complete
Works (Basel, Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999), p. 223
Fig. 5.8: Erich Mendelsohn, De-La-Warr-Pavilion, sea-side oriented staircase
Credit: Postcard collection owned by the author
Fig. 5.9: Mendelsohn, Villa Weizmann, Rehovoth/Israel, inner courtyard with staircase tower
Fig. 5.10: Daniel Libeskind, Nowhere is a center
Fig. 5.11: Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin, Paul Celan Court
Fig. 6.3: A nearly transparent apartment
Fig. 6.4: Third-stage, limited transparency
Fig. 6.5: Exhibiting transparency
Fig. 6.6: Remains from old Tuborg
Fig. 6.7: Public space at 14:22:50 on June 21
Fig. 6.9: The grand Tuborg Bottle of 1888
CHAPTER 7
Fig. 7.3: Crack in the concrete
Fig. 8.1: Christian Boltanski, The Missing House
Fig. 8.3: Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock, Places of Remembrance
Credit: Dora Osborne with kind permission of the artists
PART III
CHAPTER 9
Fig. 9.1: Do-Ho Suh, Who Am We?
Credit: Stephen White. Reproduced with kind permission of Serpentine Gallery
Fig. 9.2: Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home
Credit: Stephen White. Reproduced with kind permission of Serpentine Gallery
Fig. 9.3: Do-Ho Suh, 348 West 22nd Street, Apt. A, New York, NY 10011
Credit: Stephen White. Reproduced with kind permission of Serpentine Gallery
CHAPTER 10
Fig. 10.1c: Johnson’s Glass House
← xii | xiii →Fig. 10.1d: Farnsworth House
Fig. 10.2: Danish summerhouses
Fig. 10.3: The guest house at Niels Bohr’s summerhouse in Tibirke
CHAPTER 11
Fig. 11.2: Die Klavierspielerin
CHAPTER 12
Fig. 12.1: Susan Crile, Private England Dragging a Prisoner on a Leash, 2005
Fig. 12.2: Susan Crile, Arranged: Naked Mound of Flesh, 2005
Fig. 12.3: Susan Crile, Naked, Piled, Hooded Prisoners, Flesh to Flesh, 2005
PART IV
CHAPTER 13
Fig. 13.1: ‘This is a chair, but not just any old chair’
Credit: Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson
Fig. 13.2: Performing in front of the camera? On my way to summer camp
Fig. 16.1: Ørestad city by night
Fig. 16.3: Inner courtyard of 8 House
Fig. 16.4: Le Corbusier, Section of the Ville Radieuse
Fig. 16.5: Viewer’s perspective of the inner courtyard of 8 House
Fig. 16.6: View of interior, VM Houses
Fig. 16.9: Entrance to car park, VM Mountain
Fig. 16.10: Exterior view of the inner courtyard of 8 HouseS
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The editors apologise for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
← xiv | xv → Acknowledgements
The contributions to this volume originate in papers presented at conferences held in Copenhagen and Zurich throughout 2012 and 2013 as part of the research network (In)Visibilities – A Network for Studies on the Seeable and the Hidden of Contemporary Culture. The editors would like to acknowledge the generous financial support received from the Danish Council for Independent Research and the Swiss National Science Foundation, without which this project would not have been possible. Participants at the conferences included art practitioners and academics from areas including literature and film studies, philosophy and art history, architecture, sociology, geography and urban studies. Thematically, the conferences covered a range of topics spanning surveillance and voyeurism, architecture and visibility (especially glass), censorship and security and questions concerning spatial and archival practices. The editors would like to thank everyone who took part in the network’s activities and who, in many different ways, therefore contributed to shaping this volume and the contributions included in it, in both direct and indirect ways. We would also like to acknowledge institutional support from the University of Copenhagen, ETH Zurich and Churchill College, Cambridge: each of these institutions facilitated different stages of the collaboration in distinct ways. We furthermore would like to thank Henrik Reeh and Claus Bech-Danielsen for their continuous support for the project. At Peter Lang, we are indebted to the our editor Laurel Plapp, and we would like to thank Rachel Malkin for more help with language and with preparing the text than she probably herself imagines as well as Jesper Nielsen for editorial assistance. We also would like to thank the series editors Christian J. Emden and David Midgley for their help, feedback and encouragement. Finally, we would like to thank the authors for their time, patience and enthusiasm. ← xv | xvi →
← xvi | xvii →HENRIETTE STEINER AND KRISTIN VEEL
Negotiating (In)Visibilities in Contemporary Culture: A Short Introduction
The highly debated yet oft-repeated dictum ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ is usually used as an argument for accepting increased surveillance. But it raises fundamental questions about what privacy actually entails in a society that, with the proliferation of ubiquitous computing seeping into every corner of our everyday lives, challenges existing perceptions of human subjectivity and the place of the individual in the world. Occasionally, new revelations – such as the exposure of global surveillance programs by former NSA employee Edward Snowden and, before that, the persistent rumours about the existence of a signals intelligence collection and analysis network by the name of Echelon – reveal snippets of the technological capacities available for those who want to find out about the lives of others through state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. However, the response to such revelations seems divided. While some people react strongly and demand political intervention, the reaction of many citizens rather seems to be a shrug, implying that ‘when the technology exists, this is to be expected’.1 In this book, we propose that the widespread, existence and acceptance of the increasingly ubiquitous, and often unnoticed, surveillance technologies in our daily lives is one example of processes of negotiation that take place in contemporary culture on a wider scale: processes that are indicative of changes taking place in the relationship between what is considered visible and what is invisible – between what remains hidden and what comes to the surface – in contemporary culture. The existence of these changing perceptions is ← xvii | xviii →what we call an ongoing negotiation of (in)visibility in contemporary culture.2 If we have nothing to hide, it might not be because we do not fear anything, but rather because we believe there is nothing to see. This book develops the idea of what it means that ‘there is nothing to see’ and sets out to investigate the consequences of the shifting relationship between visibility and invisibility in contemporary culture.
Details
- Pages
- XXX, 364
- Publication Year
- 2015
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783035306712
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783035394962
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783035394979
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034309851
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-0353-0671-2
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (January)
- Keywords
- privacy urban architecture visuality
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2015. XXX, 364 pp., 64 b/w ill.
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