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The Delightful(l) Mind: A Case for Aesthetic Intuition

This research was the outcome of the HERA TEF 1 project ‘Technology Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application’. Martha Blassnigg is the editor of this anthology, which draws on her own practice as a film maker and theorist and is a collaboration with two Viennese experimental film makers Deutsch and Schimek (Associate Editors). Blassnigg was responsible for the book concept, the commissioning and organization of the text contributions and the overall editing of the anthology and is the author of the framing introduction and a contributing chapter. Deutsch and Schimek were responsible for commissioning the image essays.

Through the interplay between images and texts the anthology is intended to highlight a core aspect of media technologies – light – in relation to the human engagement with audio-visual media. Its originality lies in (i) the topic of the engagement with media technologies, in particular the implicit interrelationship between light and the creation of mental, material, mediated images (ii) an even treatment of text contributions and image essays and (iii) the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions (including film and media theory, media archaeology, cinema history and theory, philosophy, astronomy, computer music, literature studies, neuroscience, cultural anthropology, psychology, art-history and art and media practice). The book’s scope and interdisciplinary relevance is intended to have impact beyond its remit of practitioners and theorists, and to engage with an informed audience interested in qualitative dimensions of mediated processes through art and technology.

In this context, Blassnigg’s contributing chapter draws on her previous work on cinema theory and history (‘Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Cinema Experience’, Rodopi 2009) applying it to a new topic (light) in relation to a wider framework of the intersection of the arts, sciences and technology during the 19th century.