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Visions of Modernity
Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera
- Scott McQuire - University of Melbourne, Australia
December 1997 | 288 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
This overview of modern visual culture explores the relationship between technology, society and identity which underpins contemporary `media culture'. While tracing historical shifts as they have developed through, or intersected with, different camera technologies, the book is not so much about the camera's field of vision: it is concerned with processes of modernization and the dramatic changes - perceptual, experiential, epistemological - which characterize modernity.
Using the camera and its technologies as symbols of `realism', Scott McQuire interweaves: the history of visual culture from Lumiere to virtual reality by way of photography, cinema and television; the broad social and political transformations of the last 150 years; the ambivalent relationship between `image' and `reality'; and the changing relationships of time and space, particularly related to colonialism, globalization, the modern city and cyberspace available in every home.
Introduction
PART ONE: THE RUINS OF REPRESENTATION
Photomimesis
The Geometric Universe
Writing with Light
The Mechanical Eye of Reason
Promiscuous Meanings
The Mobile Frame
Flickering in Eclipses
The Ends of Representation
PART TWO: PHOTOMNEMONICS
The Eye of the Camera Faces Backwards
The Law of Progress
The Crisis of Memory
Amnesic Cultures
Eternity's Hostage
Intolerable Memories
Biodegradable Histories
PART THREE: THE NEW PLASTICITY OF SPACE AND TIME
Pure Speed
Reconstructing `the World'
The Myth of the Centre
In the Neon Forest
Interzones
Unstable Architectures
Telepresence and the Government of Time