Seeing degree zero : Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 41045637
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431415.001.0001
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- ISBN
- 9781474431415
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This large edited collection examines the critical concept ‘zero degree’ through the work of Roland Barthes and Victor Burgin. In the fields of literary studies and visual arts, the term ‘zero degree’ represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to and outside of the dominant cultural order. Taking Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as but one starting point, this collection examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws up the editors’ on-going collaboration with artist and theorist Victor Burgin. By evoking Barthes’ ‘degree zero’ the volume reverts back to an historical case but does so to look at our collective contemporary condition. Importantly the volume explores the ‘zero degree’ explicitly in terms of the image, which is apposite for thinking through and with Burgin’s visual practice and critical writings. In particular the volume focuses on Burgin’s later works, which are called ‘projections’. The works operate between still and moving image using CGI to blur the boundary between them to establish a ‘zero degree’ perspective; that is, panoramas impossible to view with a corporeal body or material camera. Zero degree seeing relates to these works through the impossible perspective that CGI environments allow, as algorithmically constructed, turning about in a panoramic virtual space from an incorporeal position. The projection of disembodied perception into virtual environments continues the long history of the technological alteration and constitution of perspective, a history that Burgin has theoretically engaged with throughout his entire career. Overall the book provides a combined reading of Barthes and Burgin that leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and political aesthetics to reconsider the material, immaterial and ontological status of the image and the technics of perception that reinforce perspectival regimes that could be, and might soon become, otherwise.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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