W.C. Bamberger is the author, editor, and translator of more than a dozen books. In 2007 he edited Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters. His translations include Two Draft Essays from 1918 by Gershom Scholem. His fourth novel, A Light Like Ida Lupino, will be published in early 2014. He lives in Michigan. Andrew Bieler is a writer, researcher, arts-based educator, and PhD Candidate in Communication and Culture at York University. His research interrogates the nuances of collaboration between artists and scientists in the context of expeditionary field studies, and describes the potential of these collaborations in learning for a sustainable future. As an educator, he curates engaging conversations between artists and other social groups and experiments with tactile ways of knowing place. He recently designed a project called The Farm, which brought together youth participants, community groups, and artists to collectively explore the future of farming in Markham, Ontario, as part of a site-specific exhibition called Land|Slide: Possible Futures. Becky Bivens is a PhD student in art history at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a lecturer at Columbia College, Chicago. Her research …

Adam Levin “Selfie noun, informal (also selfy; plural selfies): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”1 “All media work us over completely.”2 On November 18, 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary pronounced “Selfie” the word of the year. Since then, selfies have assumed a place of privilege in the dialogue concerning how digital media affects behavior. For many, taking selfies is simply a harmless past time. As with Polaroid, it is considered little more than a method for capturing a moment in one’s life and sharing it with others. Conversely, selfies are also seen as symbols of the deteriorating moral fabric of civilization; harbingers of a future digital media dystopia in which disassociated individuals callously pose before human atrocities to snap and share the pic. The latter point of view is represented by the cover of the 4 December 2013 issue of the New York Post, which shows a young woman in sunglasses posing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge …

Roberta Buiani and Gary Genosko  Abstract In 2011, Australian-based artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso exhibited her multi-part work It is not Size that Matters, it is Shape at ARC One gallery in Melbourne. It was the first of a series of installations focusing on the reproductive organs of the Harvestman, a spider native of Southern Australia. Working in the tradition of natural history, Cardoso hoped to add new specimens to her collection, turning it into a “Museum of Reproductive Morphology.” However, It is not Size that Matters, it is Shape exceeds the function of the natural history museum. Both the research methods that led to the exhibition and the choice of display of the organs reflect a novel ecological approach: the work is presented as a collaborative operation involving taxonomists, microscopists, graphic designers, and 3D printer professionals; the focus of the display is on the reproductive (or intromittent) organs of a single species using different formats, materials and scale. Upon facing the artifacts that compose Cardoso’s installation, one realizes that the hierarchies and taxonomies that traditionally …

Beatrice Choi An ‘X’ marks the spot. [Fig. 1] In the wake of the storm, military personnel spray-painted each vacated house with this grim tally to account for the evacuation of New Orleans. Most inhabitants of the houses in more prosperous neighborhoods have opted to paint over this reminder, a few still bearing the ‘X’ as if to memorialize the survivors’ experiences. A number of the houses in less affluent neighborhoods also still bear the mark, not out of a sense of shared survival or solidarity, but out of dissent or neglect. Crossed out as they are on the cultural, political and economic spectrum, the residents in less wealthy neighborhoods are tarnished by Katrina’s passage, in a material sense with the destruction of the built environment and its infrastructural support, and in a political sense depicted by the ensuing media distortion. How do the markings on these houses function as a network of signs? Embodying more than visible legacies of catastrophe, these crossed-out networks of urban wreckage signal larger ecological complexities in post-disaster New Orleans and the liminal contingencies of its residents. In my explorations of …

Hans Vermy “The theatre,” says Baudelaire, “is a crystal chandelier.” If one were called upon to offer in comparison a symbol other than this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intricate, and circular, which refracts the light which plays around its center and holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen. —André Bazin, What is Cinema?1 How we see is crucial to our understanding of theater. In the theater—from the Greek theatron or “seeing place”—light’s granting of sight to the spectator is often a given tautology; it goes without saying that light allows us to see. As the above epigraph illustrates, however, the conditions of illumination allow us to distinguish between both modes of performance that cross from the real to the aesthetic as well as to distinguish between the arts themselves, as light and its reflective materials generate classifications between …

Anya Ventura “Scientific pictures are not decoration but knowledge,” declared photo historian Vicki Goldberg in the first sentence of a 2001 New York Times article on the use of imagery in scientific practice.1 In this statement, we see a prevailing logic at work: the division between subjectivity and objectivity, form and function, pleasure and utility. To decorate, we find, is to augment reality through artifice, to overlay inoperable aesthetic considerations atop what we know to be “true” and factual. It is amid such binary oppositions that the confusion over “false color” emerges in the interpretation of telescopic images of deep space, the most famous of which are images like the Eagle Nebula produced by the Hubble Telescope.2 “False color” is the term used to describe the color assigned to the invisible wavelengths picked up by the telescope’s detectors, including radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays.3 The process of applying color to what were originally black and white images is the source of some contention among audiences who feel “tricked” upon discovering the photographs are not the …

Leonie Cooper The sun rose as quickly as it had set. Suddenly there it was, a brilliant red in my view through the periscope. It was blinding…Suddenly I saw around the capsule a huge field of particles that looked like tiny yellow stars, there were thousands of them, like swirling fireflies.1 An astronaut appears… The Space Race of the 1960s was a “theatrics of space” cultivated by NASA from an array of screen and space technologies, and within this arena, astronauts performed a vital function for they were witness to inexplicable sights never before seen.2 Often they appeared star-struck and dumbfounded: John Glenn, for instance, was astonished by the strange luminescent phenomena that appeared during his orbital flight aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. Even though Scott Carpenter’s subsequent mission provided an explanation for these mystical “fireflies”—they were the result of ice crystals forming around the spacecraft and then drifting free of it—Glenn’s encounter remains one of the many events that have granted NASA’s astronauts an equally mystical ability to see beyond visible boundaries. Conjugating up the …

Vanessa Meikle Schulman [The wound around his eye] has been constantly open, suppurating and discharging ever since … with loss of strength and increasing blindness in the left eye which is very weak & he is less & less able each year to do any manual labor or care for himself. 1 Applying in 1882 for an increase to his Civil War pension, Private James M. Greenleaf, who received his facial wound at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, attempted to convince the government that his eye—unhealed and rapidly losing its sight—was so debilitating as to prevent him from earning a living through gainful employment. To the above statement in his pension application, Greenleaf added an “affidavit signed by 24 acquaintances stating that his wound was worse than the loss of an arm or a leg.”2 Though Greenleaf also complained of pain in his hip, it was the wound to his face, with its leaking pus, that made him “totally & permanently helpless,” as the government surgeon wrote on examining him in 1907.3 The claim that Greenleaf’s …