Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers and Lisa Perrott are happy to announce the fifth book in our Bloomsbury series, New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/new-approaches-to-sound-music-and-media/)—Steve Shaviro’s The Rhythm Image: Music Videos and New Audiovisual Forms
Reviews
“A quarter-century back, MTV's Amp showcased
electronica videos, eerie creatures of beats-driven posthumanism. The show
ended, but the videos multiplied, digital tinkering to visualize hip-hop,
R&B, and new divas alongside EDM for stop-start viewing on YouTube. Steven
Shaviro philosopher of speculative fiction, at last names this core category:
the rhythm image. Gazing and auditing, applying theory as needed, he makes that
tweak in the assemblage on your screen a frontier. The filmic nugget pulsates,
in his cuts from micro to macro analysis, becoming a fundamental cultural
reshaping-the visual groove as 21st century homeland.” ―Eric Weisbard,
author of Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
“When is a book on music video not “just” a book on music video? When it deftly
weaves descriptions of digital art-making with the ideas of Henri Bergson, Immanuel
Kant, Marshall McLuhan, and Vivian Sobchack to expand on Gilles Deluge's
film-philosophy and articulate a new regime of the image: the rhythm image.
Through luxuriant close readings and invigorating exposition, Shaviro shows how
contemporary music videos immerse viewers in the new temporal and affective
relationship that organize digital media culture. A delight to read and to
contemplate!” ―Caetlin Benson-Allott, Professor of English and Film &
Media Studies, Georgetown University, USA
“In recent years, the once denigrated and impure object of the music video has
received more serious attention and nowhere more so than in Steven Shaviro's
ground-breaking work, The Rhythm Image. Combining close
engagement with the audiovisual expressive properties of specific digital music
videos with broader sociological and philosophical concerns, this book argues
for the emergence of a new diagram of audiovisual expression based neither in
movement nor pure temporality but in rhythm. While, on the one hand this book engages
with Deleuze's cinema books and through them a range of philosophical
references from Kant to Whitehead, read in conjunction with contemporary
accounts of post-cinema and digital media, at its core is an intense engagement
with the contemporary music videos for artists including Massive Attack, FKA
Twigs, Tierra Whack and Tkay Maidza that it engages with in loving detail.
Ultimately it suggests that these music videos allow for the grasping of
contemporary social transformations affecting race, gender, sexuality and
mediated desires intensively via moments of audiovisual bliss.” ―Michael N.
Goddard, Reader in Film and Screen Media, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
About the Author
Steve Shaviro is Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA. He is the author of eleven books including Cinematic Body (1993), Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), and Digital Music Videos (2017).
And about Our Series
We hope scholars interested in audiovisual relations will consider submitting a proposal to the NASMM editors (email below). We hope readers will be interested in our forthcoming books as well as recently published ones. We especially recommend—
Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, Selmin Kara, and Jonathan Leal) traces how contemporary media engage with new technologies like robotics, psychometrics, big data, and AI. It pairs humanists’ close readings of contemporary media (like Westworld and Black Mirror) with scientists’ discussions of the science and math that inform them. Cybermedia bridges one of the gaps between science and the humanities.
Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by Carol, Holly and Lisa, focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building.
Contacts
Carol Vernallis – [log in to unmask]
Holly Rogers - [log in to unmask]
Lisa Perrott - [log in to unmask]