Videology

Videology is the first volume of a 3-part critique of the ideology of realism across the culture industry, from literature to film, cybernetics and the plastic arts. Its broadly “syncretic” approach follows the models of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Karel Teige, and others, and is in keeping with the “interdiscisplinarity” of the historical avant-gardes and the project of modernity itself. The term “videology” therefore covers a nexus of aesthetic/ideological forms – from Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” and the widespread emergence of image technologies during the industrial revolution (photography, cinema), to “Big Bother,” “virtual reality,” and the discourse of post-humanism. Consequently, this study is broadly focused upon discourses of modernity/postmodernity and their contemporary ramifications in the work of experimental (anti-realist/avant-garde) writers, artists, architects, filmmakers, philosophers and theorists – including, for example, Stelarc’s robo-prosthetic performance art, Karel Teige’s ciné-poetics, Robert Smithson’s “future monuments,” Isidore Isou’s hypergraphy, the video art of Nam June Paik, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and more. In this context, “realism” is considered an instrument of cultural normalisation, co-evolving with the advent of mass literacy, global communications systems and simulacral technologies – designed to synthesise (by way of genre and “identity politics”) and (as an extension of humanism) to sentimentalise the broader abstractive processes of industrial modernity into an operative cultural framework: a framework, in other words, of commodification. Topics include David Lynch, Marc Atkins, Christian Louboutin, Philippe Sollers, Anthony Braxton, Robert Smithson, Lettrism, Blade Runner, David Cronenberg, Terry Gilliam, John Waters, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Dusan Makavejev, Robert Coover, Hunter S. Thompson, William Gibson, Stelarc, Nina Sellars, Shu Lea Cheang, Linda Dement, Megumi Igarashi.