Ecstatic Worlds

Description

When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau’s underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller’s geoscope.

Postwar artists and architects have used photography, film, and other media to imagine and record the world as a wonder of collaborative entanglement—to translate the world for the world. In this book, Janine Marchessault examines a series of utopian media events that opened up and expanded the cosmos, creating ecstatic collective experiences for spectators and participants. Marchessault shows that Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” photography exhibition, for example, and Jacques Cousteau’s 1956 underwater film Le monde du silence (The Silent World) both gave viewers a sense of the earth as a shared ecology. The Festival of Britain (1951)—in particular its Telekinema (a combination of 3D film and television) and its Live Architecture exhibition—along with Expo 67’s cinema experiments and media city created an awareness of multiple worlds. Toronto’s alternative microcinema CineCycle, Agnès Varda’s 2000 film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game (geoscope), representing ecologies of images and resources, encouraged planetary thinking. The transspecies communication platform the Dolphin Embassy, devised by the Ant Farm architecture collaborative, extends this planetary perspective toward other species; and Finnish artist Erkki Kurenniemi’s “Death of the Planet” projects a postanthropocentric future. Drawing on sources that range from the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marchessault argues that each of these media experiments represents an engagement with connectivity and collectivity through media that will help us imagine a new form of global humanism.Series Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I: Earth 19
1 Anonymous Reality and Redemption in “The Family of Man” 21
2 Invisible Ecologies: Cousteau’s Cameras and Ocean Wonders 53
Part II: Worlds 85
3 T Is for Telekinema: Projecting Future Worlds at the Festival of Britain 87
4 Terre des Hommes / Man and His World: Expo 67 as Global Media Experiment 127
Part III: Planet 159
5 Inflatable Media: Film Festivals, Microcinemas, and Ephemeral Media 165
6 Dolphins in Space, Planetary Thinking 205
Epilogue: An Ecological Approach to Media Studies 249
Notes 267
Bibliography 317
Index 341Janine Marchessault is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto.US

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