Cold War Legacies : Systems, Theory, Aesthetics
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 22293499
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409483.001.0001
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- ISBN
- 9781474409483
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- 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 edited collection connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and culture. Drawing on a diverse range of theorists, the contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcasters. The central assumption of the volume is that the historically bounded period known as the Cold War (1946–1991) does not fully capture the extent to which the institutional, technological, scientific, aesthetic and cultural forms decisively shaped during that period continue to structure, materially and conceptually, the 21st century world. In bringing together 14 original contributions, the editors set out how the infrastructure of the Cold War, its technologies, its attitudes and problems continue to inform contemporary responses to large-scale political, technological and aesthetic issues. More specifically, Bishop’s editorial and authorial contributions examine the prosecution of the Cold War as it restructured the conception and experience of time and space, of scale and agency. Nuclear weapons made it necessary to think, simultaneously, about the instantaneous (the decisive moment of mass destruction) and the endless (the stalemate of superpower stand-off; the infinity of the catastrophic post-nuclear world). The individual act was now outrageously amplified (the finger on the nuclear trigger) and radically diminished (powerless in the face of unfathomable forces with the ceding of human agency to machines in complex weapons systems). The reach of the nuclear threat expanded geopolitics to the scale of the global even as it compressed space (nowhere is safe) and promised to toxically recode matter itself. The challenges and threats posed by this radical spatio-temporal plasticity, where everything came to seem connected to everything – everywhere, everyone, all the time – engendered a mode of thinking preoccupied by networks and systems and the means of managing the proliferating complexity such systems at once represented and reproduced.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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