On nesting

Writer Julietta Singh talks to filmmaker Chase Joynt about their unfolding collaborative work on a feature-length hybrid documentary, The Nest. Taking a majestic home in central Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of a nation. Mapping the structural, political, and intimate histories of the house, the film engages archival remnants and historical fabulation to illuminate forgotten feminist pasts and tell linked stories of its transhistorical occupants. The project asks: How can built environments reveal subjugated stories of the past? How are we affected by the historical traces that linger in our dwelling places? How are race, gender, class, sexuality, and physical ability embedded in architecture? And how might we ultimately understand ourselves as artifacts of space and place that are making and telling histories otherwise?

Blue like the Mediterranean: the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive

In the prologue to Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), the speaker asks that his words appear against a grey background. Or, he continues after a pause, ‘use a blue background . . . blue just like the Mediterranean’. Beginning with this colourful riddle, this article investigates the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive. With this attention to the monochrome as a format, the author’s goal is to move away from the categories of documentary and fiction that dominate discussions of Raad and parafictional work more generally, towards the formal infrastructure through which such works command belief and emotion. This attention to the aesthetic form of the archive not only brings into focus the constituent role of design in the construction of knowledge, but it also reveals the transformation of the monochrome in its encounters with the archive, technical media, and the chromatics of affective capitalism.

Paper, glass, algorithm: teleprompters and the invisibility of screens

The teleprompter, invented in 1948 as a memory aid for show business, has become a ubiquitous technology in modern politics. Yet, the hidden ways in which this device shapes our understanding of performance, newscasting, and political rhetoric are rarely studied by media scholars. Recognizing this lacuna, this article traces the evolution of the teleprompter from a cumbersome, human-operated device to an invisible system of screens designed to conceal its own existence. The teleprompter has not only shaped the standardization of speech, but also restructured the televised spectacle by collapsing the sonic, the tactile, and the optical. By focusing on teleprompter fiascos and moments of breakdown from President Eisenhower to President Trump, we make a broader argument regarding the importance of failure and the accidental to the study of visual culture.

The art of touch: lending a hand to the sighted majority

This article describes three collaborative projects designed to explore tactile and haptic encounters with visual art. As a blind person, the author takes advantage of touch tours offered in many of the world’s museums. As rewarding as these can be, she often leaves feeling that there is something missing. She is aware that people who witness a touch tour for blind people, both companions who might be with them and strangers who might observe it, are curious, even envious. It seems only right that she, and other blind people who enjoy this privilege, have a responsibility to share the experience as a way to expand cultural knowledge about art. The projects described here enable her to begin to establish a taxonomy and vocabulary of tactile and haptic aesthetics, and model tactile descriptions of art that can benefit anyone. She does this both to reciprocate for the privilege cultural institutions bestowed on her, as well as to show that touch is not merely a poor substitute for sight, but rather a different mode of inquiry and appreciation. She hopes this work will support challenges to the ocularcentrism of the museum sector by showing how art can engage the full human sensorium. These projects all took place in the years leading up to the Covid-19 global pandemic and were a small part of initiatives at arts institutions to promote equity and inclusion by drawing on the knowledge and expertise of members of marginalized communities. As these institutions reopen post-pandemic and restructure their staff and programming, it remains to be known if they will continue the progress toward greater inclusion or return to previous models designed to serve only normative audiences. In her conclusion, the author speculates on the kind of systematic changes that will need to happen to continue to diversify museum audiences and increase multisensory access to art.

The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

‘Architecture is forever unfinished’

In this interview, the celebrated Mexican architect Frida Escobedo explains the intricacies of her design practice and her longstanding interests in Minimalism, Mexican Modernism, and the socio-political concerns facing architecture. The interview provides an insightful mid-career look at one of the most creative and compelling architects working in the world today. Escobedo and Gardner engage in a lively discussion that ranges from design theory to feminism in contemporary architecture. The interview was conducted at Harvard University on 12 December 2019.