The Generative Image

simply valorize the digital or even the generative The generative arts have invented a new artistic pedesis and laid the ground for a new materialist aesthetics of the image. The chapter discusses the various forms that the generative arts have taken, including the ordered and disordered. In particular, disordered forms of contemporary images discussed here are the visual arts, literary, plastic, and sonic forms. The argument is not that the generative arts are the only or best forms of art. Their function has been to blaze a trail that shows us what all the arts have already been doing, to one degree or another. The challenge now is to unfold the consequences of this discovery in the arts, to draw our attention to what the contemporary image shows us about the image more generally and what it is capable of today.

The Digital Image

This chapter looks at the material and kinetic structure of the electromagnetic field itself and considers the way in which it has hybridized contemporary aesthetics.

The Modern Image, I

The argument in this chapter and the next is that the aesthetic field during the modern period is defined by an elastic and differential regime of motion. These two chapters marshal support for this thesis by looking closely at major arts of the modern age: steel, photographic image, and the novel in Chapter 13, and meter, the action arts, and molecular arts in the next chapter. Although empirically quite different and distributed over hundreds of years, each follows a similar kinetic pattern or regime. This chapter looks at the way in which steel architecture, photography, and the novel move elastically by expanding and contracting and open series of frames (steel frames, photographic frames, and print frames).

The Medieval Image, I

Chapter 10 presents a realist aesthetics (versus constructivist) and a kinetic materialism (versus formal idealism) that focuses on the material kinetic structure of the work of art itself, inclusive of milieu and viewer. What the author calls “kinesthetics” is a return to the works of art themselves as fields of images, affects, and sensations. The chapter more specifically offers a focused study of the material kinetic conditions of the dominant aesthetic field of relation during the Middle Ages. The argument here and in the next chapter is that during the Middle Ages, the aesthetic field is defined by a tensional and relational regime of motion. This idea is supported by looking closely at three major arts of the Middle Ages: glassworks, the church, and distillation. The next chapter likewise considers perspective, the keyboard, and epistolography.

The Fold of Affect

This chapter develops a theory of how affective folds can emerge from the confluences of material flows through “junctions” and conjoin with one another to produce larger conjunctions or images. Matter flows and folds into affects, which conjoin into images. The concept of the affective fold developed in this chapter provides us with a kinesthetics of the processes by which confluent flows of matter are capable of taking on a regional homeorhetic stability in cycles and combining with one another in conjunctions to produce larger metastable composites or images. Once matter flows into relatively stable events and constellations, we have a surface or sensorium within which certain events can be habitually repeated in the form of persisting affective folds. But it is only with the conjunction of these affects that the affects can be attached to one another and thus said to be qualities of a sensed image.

The Modern Image, II

Over the course of the modern period, a kinesthetic shift occurred in the arts from a tensional to a more elastic pattern of motion. The argument of this chapter is that meter, action art, and molecular art are also defined predominately by a distinctly elastic pattern of motion and a differential aesthetics. This chapter concludes the book’s historical analysis of the moving image and provides a material and historical foundation for interpreting the hybrid kinetic structure of contemporary arts in the next part of the book. Art history is not dead. It all returns and resurfaces in the present, forming hybrid combinations. Although their name and appearance might have changed, the same regimes are still at work today.

The Ancient Image, II

This chapter continues the thesis presented in Chapter 7, in demonstrating that a kinesthetic shift occurs in the arts from a centripetal to a more centrifugal pattern of motion over the course of the ancient period. In Chapter 7, we looked closely at this centrifugal pattern in the formal arts of written verse, tragedy, and metallurgy. In this chapter, we demonstrate the dominance of the same kinetic pattern in the arts of architecture, music, and medicine. The argument of this chapter is that each of these major fields is defined predominately by a distinctly centrifugal pattern of motion and a formal aesthetics. The argument is that the origin of form is not eternal or immaterial but rather in the kinetic structure of matter itself.

Centrifugal Form

This chapter argues that aesthetic form emerges from matter in motion. Form is not different in kind than matter and function; it is different only in kinetic distribution or regime. The form of something is always a circulation of motion, but in a specific pattern. Form is not a geometric essence, like a circle or an empirical object like a round plate, but, rather, a material kinetic process of rounding or roundness. The form or shape of images and our ideas of images are both made possible by the continuous circulation of matter into a specific form or pattern, again and again. All things are kinomorphic, but when a fixed pattern is used as a model that forces all other flows into a single set of kinetic relations, there is a kind of formalism or dominance of form over kinetic formation. This is what occurred in the ancient world.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book, summarizing its three main contributions: the kinetic theory of the image, the kinetic history of the image, and a theory of the contemporary kinetic image. The chapter also recapitulates the limits of the project and offers suggestions for future applications of the kinesthetic project more broadly. The advent of the digital image, defined by a continuous flow of electricity, forces us to see that the image is not and never has been a representation of a static model. Images have always had a material agency. Movement, and not representation, has always been central to the image, making possible a new materialist aesthetics.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the historical importance of the image, provides a methodological framework for studying moving images, lays out the two major problems the book aims to overcome, describes the limitations of the book, and offers its plan of organization. As such, it redefines the image as fundamentally mobile and thus proposes to investigate all images as mobile images. It argues for a new materialist aesthetics distinct from representational and constructivist theories. That is, the image is not a copy nor a movement relative to an object or subject; it is not even a copy of a copy without an original. All these structures have to be accounted for, starting from the historical mobility of the image, and not from any metaphysical or ontological position. Therefore, the book is an attempt to develop a theory and a history of the logic and structure of the moving image.