Enfoldment and Infinity: an Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjr041
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Religion, Digital Communication
ResumoMedia theorist Laura U. Marks argues convincingly in her new book, Enfoldment and Infinity: an Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, that an infinity of artistic forms arise from a unitary Kunstwollen, the ‘will of art’ elaborated by art historian Alöis Riegl. Marks is able to elaborate connections between such disparate art forms as ancient Islamic calligraphy and computer-generated vectors, Persian carpets and neobaroque films, and the pixillated digitality of modern technology and fana', the self-eclipsing ecstasy of Islamic mysticism. Although certainly distinct from one another, these examples bear traces of a common origin that manifests itself to discerning viewers. This book contributes to a growing field of scholarship on neobaroque elements in both classical Islamic and contemporary computer-generated art and media, which includes recent works by Timothy Murray, Angela Ndalianis, and Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.1 Marks enriches this discussion by introducing a valuable juxtaposition between the two artistic traditions that manages to explore their genealogical interaction without ignoring the different sociocultural and historical environments out of which they arose, or suggesting a teleological progression from one to the other.
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