Techno-Ecologies of Bill Viola and Gilbert Simondon
The Birth of Form
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:30th Nov '25
£95.00
This title is due to be published on 30th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Both Viola and Simondon prioritise a techno-aesthetic experience that reveals a consistent pattern of interdependence between form and matter, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Inspired by Simondon’s ideas on individuation as process, and by other major figures of process philosophy such as Raymond Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi, Elena del Río delves deep into Viola’s art and finds a politics of nature that is also a politics of the affects. In taking full account of the interrelation between collective affects and living milieus, this politics exceeds the still anthropocentric project of a politics reductively focused on environmental degradation. The book works with a broad concept of ecology that encompasses a nature-culture continuum - from Simondon’s associated milieu to Guattari’s tripartite ecological praxis, from Deleuze and Guattari’s existential territories to Massumi’s affective events. Attending to this nature-culture continuum and activating our collective energies are prime strategies in tackling the overwhelming psycho-social and environmental crises we face.
Reading Viola and Simondon together, del Río formulates two bold and marvelous propositions: video (and by extension, cinema) belongs to nature, and the camera is a philosophical system. Her book lives up to the challenge of these propositions, offering luminous readings of Viola video works while upending received understandings of nature and culture, technology and ecology. -- Thomas Lamarre, The University of Chicago
Bill Viola’s video works give a sense of being in the presence of an ever-expanding infinite—as in his works where imperceptibly slow movement, rather than grasping the visible world, renders the field of vision even more infinite. While Viola’s great body of work is often interpreted as religious or mystical, Elena del Rio argues convincingly that the infinite presence palpable in his work is an infinity immanent to this world: an ever-changing individuation in rhythm with the humans, machines, and other entities that compose it. -- Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University
ISBN: 9781399554770
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
280 pages