University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Neuro-avantgarde

(USC Thesis Other)

Neuro-avantgarde

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content NEURO-AVANTGARDE
by
Szilvia Ruszev
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE))
August 2022
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... vii
Introduction to the website “Neuro-Avantgarde” ..........................................................................1
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................2
Appendices ...................................................................................................................................13
Appendix A: Link to the documentation of the website “Neuro-Avantgarde” ....13
Appendix B: Structure of the website “Neuro-Avantgarde” ................................14
ii
LIST OF FIGURES
0 Introduction
1. Still image from the video Undisclosed
2. Still image from the interactive web Wayward Space
3. Still image from the video essay Wilderness Transcended
4. Still image from the video Untitled
5. Still image from the video essay Rhythmic Trajectories
6. Still image from the interactive VR Heterotopias
7. Still image from the video Blonde Woman
8. Still image from the video Calafia
Chapter 1
1. Still image from the movie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2. Still image from the video installation Mercy Garden
3. Still image from the movie The Intruder
4. Still image from the video installation The Tender Room
5. Chronophotography image
6. Chronophotography image
7. Still image from the short movie Ballet Mécanique
8. Still image from the short movie Ballet Mécanique
9. Visualization of the short movie Wagah
10. Visualization of the movie A Woman Under the Influence
11. View of Avid timeline
iii
12. Diagrams for the movie Alexender Nevsky
13. Still image from the movie Unconscious
14. Still image from the short movie Strange Fish
15. Scan of the editorial using pins from Jane Austen's manuscript The Watson
16. Photo of film-stickies wall showing the narrative structure of a film
17. Still image from the movie The Beaches of Agnès
18. Still image from the movie Eraserhead
19. Photomontage editing with film stock
18. Still image from the movie Hitchcock
Chapter 2
1. Photo Rock of Ages #1
2. Photo Densified Oil Filters #1
3. Photo of Google Data Center
4. World map of underwater telecommunication cables
5. Photo Nickel Tailings #31
6. Photo of underwater telecommunication cable
7. Screenshot from the project Anatomy of an AI
8. An automated robotic system sorts and transports parcels in the warehouse
9. Photo of installation Help Myself
Chapter 3
1. Drawing of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
2. Image of a single neuron and its 3D reconstruction
3. White matter fiber architecture from the Connectome Scanner Dataset
iv
4. Still image from the installation You are the Ocean / Brainwave
5. Still image from the installation A Forest
6. Still image from the installation Superimposition
7. Photo Rashomon
8. Still image from the video Venus III: An Indirect Reflection
9. Still image from the art project My Friend Sylvia
10. Still image from the video StyleGAN2 - Mapping Music to Facial Expressions in Real Time
Chapter 4
1. Still image from the movie The Tracey Fragments
2 . Flowchart of the possible outcomes in the series "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch"
3. Technical diagram of the installation Obsession
4 . Still image from the movie Moment
5 . Still image from the installation Eunoia II
6 . Photo of the interior of the installation Wave UFO
7. Still image from the installation Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze
8. Different renderings of the HTML code Purecss-Francine
9. Still image from the video Learning to See
1 0. Screenshot of the interface of the "Sensory Moving Image Archive"
Chapter 5
1. Photo of the installation Melting Memories
2. Digital painting: Audrey Hepburn
3. Still image from the video A Minute Ago
v
4. Still image from the video essay Chaos Cinema
5. Still image from the movie The Image Book
6. Still image from the installation Weed Killer
7. Photo: Gigamacro Image of a 9 mm Casing
8. Black Lives Matter mural
9. Still image from the 3-channel video Exposure
10. Photo from the exhibition Forensic Architecture: Hacia Una Estética
Chapter 6
1. Photo of the installation Pizzagate-Neon
2. Still image from the movie All Divided Selves
3. Still image from the movie I can't get you out of my Head
4. Photo of the installation The Mirrorbox
5. Still image from the installation Conversations with Bina48
6. Six categories of entoptic phenomena compared with San and Coso Rock-art depictions
7. Tweet "Chihuahua or Muffin?"
8. Phtoto of the instalallation Wave UFO
Chapter 7
1. Still image from the video Monster Movie
2. Still image from the music video Mequetrefe
3. Still image from the video Safe Conduct
4. Still image from the music video How's That
5. Still image from the movie Memoria
vi
6. Still image from the video Untitled
7. Still image from the live video feed Kasmu Meremuuseum
8. Screenshot from the project Safebook
9. Still image from the short movie Walker
10. Still image from the interactive web Wayward Space
11. Still image from the video essay Digital Abject
vii
ABSTRACT
The dissertation explores contemporary media art within the framework of contemporary
capitalism and introduces the term “neuro-avantgarde”. The interdisciplinary research is situated
within the field of cinema and media studies and invites ideas from cognitive sciences,
neurosciences, computer vision and philosophy. The dissertation brings together a written
dissertation and media-rich experiences accessible through a website.
Ubiquitous visuality, virtuality and technological acceleration are conditions of the contemporary
media landscape that seem self-evident in our everyday lives. Generations are growing up
surrounded by a multiplicity of screens, in a hybrid techno-cultural mediasphere
1
that augments,
if not completely supersedes, our natural surroundings. This contemporary media landscape has
been theorized as a post-cinema
2
environment, in which moving images have left the movie
theater and now saturate our daily lives across myriad displays. New kinds of images
continuously emerge in a “digital, interactive, networked, ludic, miniaturized, mobile, social,
processual, algorithmic, aggregative, and convergent media environment.”
3

At the same time, contemporary capitalism
4
has reached a stage in which production can be
achieved through digital labor and the cognitive and affective can be commodified. Capitalism
1
Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
2
Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, “Perspectives on Post-Cinema: Introduction,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-
Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016), 1-20.
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/.
3
Denson and Leyda, “Perspectives on Post-Cinema: Introduction.”
4
The term late capitalism (used first in print by German economist Werner Sombart and introduced in English by
cultural theorist Fredric Jameson) goes back to the post-World War II economic expansion and foreshadows the
kinds of inequities that neoliberalism and globalization brought. This article focuses on an even more accelerated
viii
is interested in the colonization of our minds, affects, and desires, and thus positivist brain-
centered neuroscience seems to be the perfect field for creating ideas, tools and methods that
naturalize contemporary capitalism’s ideology. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests a turn to
“psychopolitics,”
5
a mode of operation of contemporary capitalism defined by new technologies
of power that target the immaterial and psychic aspects of human existence. Artist and theorist
Warren Neidich goes even further in looking at how the production of material objects has been
overtaken by the production of psychic effects and software agents that calibrate and control
our choices and desires.
6
The interdependence of mind-focused capitalism and brain-centered
positivist neuroscience results in what some call neuroculture,
7
a neurocentric cultural
landscape that revolves around a normalized and biological view of the mind separated from
the body. In the realm of the post-cinematic, the recursive process between brain/mind, body
and image/culture creates a technologically defined, ocularcentric feedback loop driven by the
politics of contemporary capitalism.
Material images, produced by technologies of contemporary capitalism, oversaturate our sensory
environment and colonize our minds by imposing inner mental images conformed to narrow
standards defined by contemporary capitalism. As a consequence of the virtual and networked
character of the surrounding mediasphere, prescribed by the oppressive ideology of
version, in the specific timeframe of the beginning of the 21st century and, as the article will follow, connects it to
the idea of immaterial labor and the expansion of digital, networked technologies.
5
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, translated by Erik Butler
(London; New York: Verso, 2017).
6
Warren Neidich and Norman Bryson, “Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism,” in The
Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One, edited by Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich (Berlin:
Archive Books, 2013), 219-66.
7
See Tony D. Sampson, The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (Minneapolis: Univ ersity of
Minnesota Press, 2016); See also: Edmund T. Rolls, Neuroculture: On the Implications of Brain Science
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
ix
contemporary capitalism, central categories such as the self, time, space and cognition have been
re-evaluated. On the one hand, there is an immense normalizing force in terms of conforming to
narrowly defined categories that doesn't allow diversity or non-conformity. Normalization
applies not only in the ways in which these categories have been defined by contemporary
capitalism but also in the formal-aesthetic character through which these categories become
images. On the other hand, media produced by the same technological and socio-cultural
apparatus of contemporary capitalism has the capacity to reflect, critique, question, infiltrate or
destabilize the system from within.
What kinds of formal-aesthetic gestures might be used under contemporary capitalism to
poetically destroy the ideological colonization of our minds, affects and desires? How can
montage, understood as a generative and critical embodied praxis, be expanded in the realm of
the post-cinematic? I examine how the entanglement between contemporary capitalism and
other oppressive ideologies, such as white supremacy, positivist neurosciences and digital
networked technologies, undergirds so-called neuroculture. I argue that neuroculture exerts its
underlying ideology through images, and conditions specific formal-aesthetic characteristics
such as high quality, smoothness, operationality, modulation, fluidity and the manipulative
microtemporality. I introduce the term neuro-avantgarde as a mode of constant modulation of
the technological and ideological apparatus of contemporary capitalism. In other words, neuro-
avantgarde holds together artistic practices capable of unsettling hegemonic structures
underlying technology, form and content in contemporary media art. The political correlates to
the formal aspects and situates them in the context of contemporary capitalism, under which
the target is the human mind – its attention, decision-making, neuronormativity and
x
neuroplasticity. What I call neuro-avantgarde finds itself in the altered image, appropriating
technologies of vision by dismissing their ontological specificity: the digital abject, the glitchy,
the low resolution and the extremely slow. Neuro-avantgarde is deeply connected to
technology, yet it is also in constant friction with the technological tools used to create neuro-
avantgarde works. Neuro-avantgarde is at its height when technology fails and when neuro-
avantgarde can create so-called “inflection points” that disturb, invert or defy the “cognitive
assemblage”
8
of human and non-human elements on a systematic level.
At stake in this dissertation is the critical charting of a contemporary visual neuroculture and
the activation of an interdisciplinary framework that is able to conceptualize contemporary
data-driven post-indexical images, the ways in which image production and consumption are
determined by contemporary capitalism, and the inflection points that can resist and destabilize
underlying hegemonic structures embedded in images.
Alongside the interdisciplinary theoretical investigation that drives my dissertation, the formal
innovation of its execution is a significant part of my intellectual interest. The dissertation
itself is media assemblage emphasizing a rhizomatic and open structure. This approach has
been inspired by the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Aby Warburg. Eisenstein dreamt about the
possibility of publishing a spherical book
9
, where its transdisciplinary components
dynamically interact with each other, resonating with the rhythm of the gestures of the reader.
8
Katherine N. Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017), 116.
9
Sergei Eisenstein and Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein: METHOD, transcribed, edited and
commented by Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin, San Francisco: Potemkin Press, 2008).
xi
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas
10
connects loosely arranged images into large physical
tableaus, some versions of the same pictures, some from a different context but all part of a
visual continuity. The digital assemblage acts as an embodied theory, reflecting the idea that
film is a thinking medium, producing abstract knowledge through its sensuous material
capacities.
10
Aby Warburg et al., Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original (Berlin; London; Berlin: Hatje Cantz,
2020).
1
INTRODUCTION TO THE WEBSITE “NEURO-AVANTGARDE”
The dissertation takes the form of a media assemblage accessed through a website. Text and
images have an equal standing and interact with each other. It is a repository of quotes, images
and thoughts, embracing the unsteadiness of language and the disquietude of thought. The form
of the assemblage as a dynamic structure emphasizes heterogeneity and fragmentation through
its open structure. Both the juxtaposition of images and the parataxis of text require a curious
reader-explorer, one who is willing to wander and take part of the meaning-making process.
This assemblage acts as a counter-gesture to the categoric, linear and normalizing singular
perspective of traditional academic work and invites contemplation and serendipitous exploration
of the montage of images and text.
The website can be explored in various ways. There is a textual layer that can be read in a linear
manner, and there is a layer of images that can be moved around to reveal underlying layers of
text and images. Although there is an indicated direction of exploration, there are intentional
gaps in style and thought, offering the possibility to explore relationalities and establish
connections between the textual and the visual in unexpected ways.
The project invites the reader to become an explorer, to slow down, to be playful and curious and
to be willing to be part of the meaning-making process.
The website can be accessed through this web address:
https://szilviaruszev.com/neuroavantgarde/
2
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Steve F. Technologies of Vision: The War between Data and Images.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Baldacci, Cristina, and Marco Bertozzi. Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in
Contemporary Arts. Milan: Mimesis International, 2018.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas
Dunlap. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.
Blakely, Tim and Michał Januszewski, “A Browsable Petascale Reconstruction of the Human
Cortex.” Google AI (blog). June 1, 2021. http://ai.googleblog.com/2021/06/a-browsable-
petascale-reconstruction-of.html.
Blanchette, Jean-François. “A Material History of Bits.” Journal of the American Society
for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1042–57.
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21542.
Bruin, Leon de, Albert Newen, and Shaun Gallagher, eds. The Oxford Handbook of 4E
Cognition. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Casemajor, Nathalie. “Digital Materialisms: Frameworks for Digital Media Studies.”
Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication 10, no. 1 (September 15, 2015): 4–17.
https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.209.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press,
1994.
Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017.
Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19.
Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction Vol. 1. London: Open
Humanities Press, 2015.
Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial
Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
3
Crawford, Kate and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An
Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources,” AI Now Institute and
Share Lab. September 7, 2018. https://anatomyof.ai
Crawford, Kate and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine
Learning,” AI Now Institute. September 19, 2019. https://excavating.ai
D’Aloia, Adriano, and Ruggero Eugeni. “Neurofilmology: An Introduction.” Cinéma & Cie.
Film and Media Studies Journal 14, no. 22–23 (October 1, 2014).
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/view/16335.
Damasio, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon,
2021.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
———. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. Revised edition. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
Denson, Shane and Julia Leyda, “Perspectives on Post-Cinema: Introduction.” In Post-
Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 1-
20. Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016. http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/.
Doyle, John. “Adam Curtis as Remixologist: The Case for Metajournalism as Radical Practice.”
Studies in Documentary Film 11, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 45–63.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2016.1266899.
Edwards, Paul. N. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in
the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” In Modernity and Technology, edited by
Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, 185–225. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003.
Eisenstein, Sergei, and Oksana Bulgakowa. Sergei Eisenstein: METHOD. Transcribed,
edited and commented by Oksana Bulgakowa. Berlin ; San Francisco: PotemkinPress.
2008.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” In Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 195-267. New York: Harcourt Inc, 1977.
4
Ensmenger, Nathan. “The Environmental History of Computing.” Technology and Culture 59,
no. 4S (2018): 7–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0148.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books,
2009.
Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Fox, Dominic. Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant
Dysphoria. UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Franck, Georg. “The Economy of Attention.” Journal of Sociology 55, no. 1 (March 2019):
8–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783318811778.
Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor &
Francis Group, 2014.
Gallese, Vittorio. “Embodied Simulation. Its Bearing on Aesthetic Experience and the Dialogue
Between Neuroscience and the Humanities.” Gestalt Theory 41, no. 2 (July 1, 2019): 113–
27. https://doi.org/10.2478/gth-2019-0013.
———. The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. Translated by Frances
Anderson. Illustrated edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014.
Griziotti, Giorgio, and Tiziana Terranova. Neurocapitalism: Technological Mediation and
Vanishing Lines. Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey. New York: Minor
Compositions, 2018.
Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK; Malden,
MA: Polity, 2017.
———. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by
Erik Butler. London; New York: Verso, 2017
———. The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today.
Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2018
Hansen, Mark B. N. “From Fixed to Fluid.” In Releasing the Image: From Literature to
New Media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, 83-112. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804779111.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
Reprint edition. Penguin Books, 2004.
5
Hartman-Caverly, Sarah. “Human Nature Is Not a Machine: On Liberty, Attention
Engineering, and Learning Analytics.” Library Trends 68, no. 1 (2019): 24–53.
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2019.0029.
Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David
J. Heeger. “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film.” Projections 2, no. 1 (January 1,
2008): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2008.020102.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
———. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Illustrated edition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007.
Hui, Yuk. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Electronic Mediations 48. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
———. “On a Possible Passing from the Digital to the Symbolic,” 2 or 3 Tigers (website).
Edited by Anselm Franke and Hyunjin Kim. HKW, 2017.
https://www.hkw.de/en/tigers_publication/on_a_possible_passing_from_the_digital_t
o_the_symbolic__yuk_hui/on_a_possible_passing_from_the_digital_to_the_symbolic
__yuk_hui.php.
Huston, Joseph P., Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi Francesco Agnati, and Camilo
José Cela Conde, eds. Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge, UK;
Malden, MA: Polity, 2007.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347-58. University of Illinois Press,
1988.
––––. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Keating, AnaLouise. Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of
Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Kindle.
Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process.
Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA, London, UK: The MIT Press, 2014.
6
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Picador,
2008.
Kocka, Jürgen, and Jeremiah Riemer. Capitalism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2016.
Kotz, David M. The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez.
Reprint edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Kroker, Arthur. Exits to the Posthuman Future. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity,
2014.
Kwet, Michael. “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global
South.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (April 1, 2019): 3–26.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172.
Laine, Tarja. Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies. London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781628928693.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial labour. ” In Radical thought in Italy, edited by Paolo
Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–146. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996.
“Leibniz: Philosophy and the Creation of Concepts, Lecture 01, 15 April 1980.” The Deleuze
Seminars (website). Accessed June 24, 2022.
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/leibniz-philosophy-and-creation-concepts/lecture-
01.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Reprint edition. Princeton
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.
Reprint edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Lewis-Williams, J. D., T. A. Dowson, Paul G. Bahn, Robert G. Bednarik, John Clegg, Mario
Consens, Whitney Davis, et al. “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper
7
Palaeolithic Art.” Current Anthropology 29, no. 2 (April 1988): 201–45.
https://doi.org/10.1086/203629.
Lucas, Gale M., Jonathan Gratch, Aisha King, and Louis-Philippe Morency. “It’s Only a
Computer: Virtual Humans Increase Willingness to Disclose.” Computers in Human
Behavior 37 (August 1, 2014): 94–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.04.043.
MacKenzie, Adrian, and Anna Munster. “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their
Invisualities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (September 1, 2019): 3–22.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508.
Malabou, Catherine, and Clayton Crockett. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic,
Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Columbia University
Press, 2009.
Malabou, Catherine, and Marc Jeannerod. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated
by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity.
Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Mann, Steve. “‘Sousveillance’: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging.” In Proceedings of
the 12th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA ’04, 620.
New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1145/1027527.1027673.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory And Multisensory Media. Minneapolis:
University Of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Masson, Eef. “Browsing Moving Image Collections.” The Sensory Moving Image Archive (blog),
November 26, 2019.
https://sensorymovingimagearchive.humanities.uva.nl/index.php/2019/11/26/browsing-
moving-image-collections/.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press Books, 2002.
Maynard, Andrew David, and Marissa Scragg. “The Ethical and Responsible Development and
Application of Advanced Brain Machine Interfaces.” Journal of Medical Internet Research
21, no. 10 (October 31, 2019). https://doi.org/10.2196/16321.
Menkman, Rosa. Beyond Resolution. institutions of Resolution Disputes (i.R.D.), 2020.
https://beyondresolution.info/Beyond-Resolution.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. 2nd edition.
London: Routledge, 2002.

8
Mersmann, Birgit. “Digital Abstraction, Interface Between Electronic Media Art and Data
Visualization.” In The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-Figurative Images and the
Modern World, edited by Krešimir Purgar, 176-193. New York: Routledge, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429262500.

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. New edition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

———. “THE BIOCYBERNETIC FOREST : Max de Esteban, AI, and the Iconology of
Thinking.” MAXDEESTEBAN (blog). Accessed January 19, 2022.
https://maxdeesteban.com/wjtmitchell/.

Molteni, Megan. “These Neurons Are Alive and Firing. And You Can Watch Them In 3-D.”
Wired. October 25, 2017. https://www.wired.com/story/live-neurons-help-scientists-build-
better-maps-of-the-brain/.

Mondloch, Kate. A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Moulier-Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity,
2012.

Nanay, Bence. “Multimodal Mental Imagery.” Cortex 105 (August 2018): 125–34.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.07.006.

Neidich, Warren. “Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism.” In The
Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One, edited by Arne De Boever and
Warren Neidich, 219-66. Berlin: Archive Books, 2013.

Neidich, Warren, and Norman Bryson. Warren Neidich: Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema
and the Brain. New York ; Riverside, CA: D.A.P./UCR/California Museum of
Photography, 2003.

Neidich, Warren, Susanne Prinz and Sarrita Hunn. “About Activist Neuroaesthetics.”
ACTIVIST NEUROAESTHETICS (website). February 8, 2021.
https://activistneuroaesthetics.art/about/.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
Illustrated edition. New York: NYU Press, 2018.

Noë, Alva. “The Art Of The Brain, On Exhibit.” NPR, January 20, 2017.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/20/510528975/the-art-of-the-brain-on-
exhibit.

Okun, Tema. “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics.” White Supremacy Culture
(website). 2021. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html.

9
Orr, David W. “Slow Knowledge.” Conservation Biology 10, no. 3 (1996): 699–702.

Paglen, Trevor. “Operational Images. ” E-Flux Journal #59 November 2014.
https://www.eflux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/.

Parikka, Jussi. “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter.”
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 95.

Pearlman, Karen. Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing. 2nd edition. New York: Focal
Press, 2015.

———. “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition.” In Cognitive Theory and
Documentary Film, edited by Catalin Brylla and Mette Kramer, 300-10. Cham,
Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-
319-90332-3.

———. “On Rhythm in Film Editing.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of
Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa, and Shawn
Loht, 143–63. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_7.

Pisters, Patricia. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen
Culture. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. “Neurocultures Manifesto.” Social Text, Periscope (website). April 6,
2012. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/neurocultures-manifesto/.

Robertson, Robert. “Eisenstein, Synaesthesia, Symbolism and the Occult Traditions.” OFF
Screen 10, no. 3 (March 2006). https://offscreen.com/view/eisenstein_synaesthesia.

Rolls, Edmund T. Neuroculture: On the Implications of Brain Science. Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed
Human Being. Illustrated edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008.

Royakkers, Lamber, and Rinie van Est. Just Ordinary Robots: Automation from Love to
War. CRC Press, 2015.

Ruszev, Szilvia. “Rhythmic Trajectories – Visualizing Cinematic Rhythm in Film Sequences.”
Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, no. 7
(December 7, 2018). https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0007.146.

––––. “Wilderness Transcended (Poetic Capacity of Wildlife Webcams in The Time of
Pandemic Isolation).” Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference 2020, Dark Eden:
figshare, 2021. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16993372.v2.

10
Sampson, T., and Rizosfera. Digital Neuroland: An Interview with Tony D. Sampson.
Rizosfera, 2017.
https://monoskop.org/File:Digital_Neuroland._An_Interview_with_Tony_D._Sampso
n.pdf.

Sampson, Tony D. The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Schmitz, Sigrid, and Grit Höppner. “Neurofeminism and Feminist Neurosciences: A
Critical Review of Contemporary Brain Research.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
8 (July 25, 2014). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00546.

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986), 3–64.
https://doi.org/10.2307/778312.

Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

——. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2010.

——. “Post-Continuity: An Introduction.” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film,
edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 51-65. Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016.
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/.

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.

Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2016.

Stevens, Martijn. “Settle for nothing: materializing the digital.” Artnodes, no. 12 (December 19,
2012). https://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i12.1606.

Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” E-flux Journal. #10 November 2009.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

——. “In Free Fall : A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” E-flux Journal. #24
April 2011. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-
experiment-on-vertical-perspective/.

Stork, Matthias. “Chaos : Assaultive Action Aesthetics,” Media Fields Journal, August 6,
2013. http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/chaos-cinema/.

Sutton, John. “Distributed Cognition: Domains and Dimensions.” Pragmatics & Cognition 14,
no. 2 (January 1, 2006): 235–47. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.14.2.05sut.

11
Thürlemann, Felix. Mehr als ein Bild: Für eine Kunstgeschichte des hyperimage.
München: Fink Wilhelm GmbH + Co.KG, 2013.

Tikka, Pia. Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense. Helsinki: University of Art and
Design Helsinki, 2008.

Valencia Triana, Margarita, and John Pluecker. Gore Capitalism. Semiotext(e)
Intervention Series 24. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018.

Väliaho, Pasi. Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

Valla, Clement. “Postcards from Google Earth.” Clement Valla (website). Accessed April
14, 2022. http://clementvalla.com/work/postcards-from-google-earth/.

Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited with an introduction by
Annette Michelson, translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984.

Viney, William. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Vogman, Elena. Sinnliches Denken: Eisensteins exzentrische Methode. Zürich: Diaphanes
Verlag, 2018.

Vuger, Dario “Digital Landscpaes of the Internet.” In The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-
Figurative Images and the Modern World, edited by Krešimir Purgar, 208-19.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429262500.

Warburg, Aby, Axel Heil, Roberto Ohrt, Bernd Scherer, Bill Sherman, and Claudia
Wedepohl. Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original. Berlin ; London ;
Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020.

Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. New
York: Zone Books, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14gphth.

White, Frank. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. 3rd edition.
Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.
https://doi.org/10.2514/4.103223.

Williams, Eric, Colin a Palmer, and William A. Darity. Capitalism and Slavery. 3rd
edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Wilson, Julie. Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Zdebik, Jakub. Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization.
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2012.

12
Zeki, Semir. “A Theory of Micro-Consciousness.” In The Blackwell Companion to
Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, 580-88. Blackwell,
2007.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at
the New Frontier of Power. Reprint edition. New York: PublicAffairs, 2020.

13
APPENDIX A

Link to the documentation of the website “Neuro-Avantgarde.”

https://vimeo.com/724252572/2ab60500b7

14
APPENDIX B

Structure of the website “Neuro-Avantgarde.”

Index

Fig. 1. Screenshot Index page

15
0. Introduction
0.0 Guidance
0.01 Introduction
0.02 Methodology and Methods
0.03 Artistic Practice

Fig. 2. Screenshot Introduction page

16
Fig. 3. Screenshot Introduction page

Fig. 4. Screenshot Introduction page

17
Chapter 1.
Montage at the Core of it
1.01 What is Montage?
1.02.a Montage and Deleuze
1.03.a Montage and Difference
1.04.a Montage and Cinematic Rhythm I.
1.05.a Montage and Cinematic Rhythm II.
1.06.a Multimodality, Synesthesia
1.07.a Montage and Cognition
1.08.a Montage as Embodied Praxis
1.09.a Montage and Sensuous Knowledge
1.10.a Montage and Critique

18
Fig. 5. Screenshot Chapter 1.

Fig. 6. Screenshot Chapter 1.

19
Chapter 2.
Contemporary Capitalism
2.01 Contemporary Capitalism and the Sensuous
2.02 Early History of Capitalism
2.03 Capitalism and other Oppressive Ideologies
2.04 Capitalism in the 21st Century
2.05 Capitalism and Digital Labor
2.06 From the Industrial to the Biocognitive Stage
2.07 Attention
2.08 Emotion and Affect
2.09 Platform, Surveillance

Fig. 6. Screenshot Chapter 2.

20
3. Capitalism, Neuroscience, Neuroculture
3.01.a Neuroculture
3.01.b Images of the Brain
3.02.a Optimization and Commodification
3.02.b Metaphors of the Brain
3.03.a Self-enclosed Individualism
3.03.b The Blithesome Other

Fig. 7. Screenshot Chapter 3.

21
4. The Role of Images in Neuroculture
4.01What is an Image?
4.02 Hyperimage
4.03 The Vitality of the Image
4.04 Mental Images
4.A Neurocinematics
4.B Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Arts
4.C Vision beyond Vision

Fig. 7. Screenshot Chapter 4.

22
5. Oppressive Conditions in the Post-Cinematic Image
5.01 Introduction
5.02 High Quality, Smoothness
5.03 The Manipulative Micro-Temporality
5.04 Modulation, Fluidity
5.05 Operationality

Fig. 8. Screenshot Chapter 5.

23
6. The possibility of Critique Within
6.01 Introduction
6.02 Questioning the Positivist View of Neurosciences
6.03 Psychopathologies of contemporary Capitalism
6.04 Activist Neuroaesthetics
6.05 Psychopolitics
6.06 Feedback Loops of the Self
6.07 Neuro-Image
6.A Feminist New-Materialism
6.B Entoptic Phenomena

Fig. 9. Screenshot Chapter 6.

24
7. Neuro-Avantgarde
7.01 Introduction
7.02 Neuro-Avantgarde
7.03 Pre-post Avant-garde
7.04 Digital Materiality
7.05 Montage and Post-Cinema
7.06 Assemblage
7.07 Media Assemblage
7.08 Media Assemblage and the Spectator
7.09 Media Assemblage and Representation
7.10 Media Assemblage and Liveness
7.11 Post-cinematic Montage and Plasticity
7.12 Post-cinematic Montage as a Critique
7.13 Digital Abject
7.14 Low Resolution/Poor Image
7.15 The Extreme Slow
7.16 Montage in Post-Cinema can Be
7.17 What is a Cut in Post-Cinema?

9. Bibliography

25

Fig. 10. Screenshot Chapter 7.

Fig. 11. Screenshot Chapter 7.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

From the extraordinary to the everyday: fan culture’s impact on the transition of Chinese post-cinema in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century

PDF

Somatic montage: supra-dimensional composition in cinema and the arts

PDF

Policy and practice: United States and European Union media and technology education

PDF

Emergent media technologies and the production of new urban spaces

PDF

Encounters with the Anthropocene: synthetic geologies, diegetic ecologies and other landscape imaginaries

PDF

Labors of love: Black women, cultural production, and the romance genre

PDF

Marquee survivals: a multimodal historiography of cinema's recycled spaces

PDF

Poetic science: evoking wonder through transmedia discovery of science

PDF

Enigmatic form-finding

PDF

Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

PDF

Worldizing data: embodiment, abstraction, and distortion in art-science praxis

PDF

Unsettled media: documenting refugees and Europe's shifting borders along the Balkan Route

PDF

Toward counteralgorithms: the contestation of interpretability in machine learning

PDF

Designing speculative rituals: tangible imaginaries and fictive practices from the (inter)personal to the political

PDF

Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

PDF

Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

PDF

Real fake rooms: experiments in narrative design for virtual reality

PDF

Transference

PDF

A meditative application inspired by emotional regulation

PDF

The Seoul of Los Angeles: contested identities and transnationalism in immigrant space

Asset Metadata

Creator Ruszev, Szilvia (author)

Core Title Neuro-avantgarde

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 08/03/2022

Defense Date 08/09/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cognitive capitalism,digital abject,digital materiality,hyper image,media assemblage,montage,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Willis, Holly (committee chair), Anderson, Steve (committee member), Imre, Aniko (committee member)

Creator Email Ruszev@gmail.com,Ruszev@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111376001

Unique identifier UC111376001

Legacy Identifier etd-RuszevSzil-11076

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Ruszev, Szilvia

Type texts

Source 20220803-usctheses-batch-968 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu