Warren Neidich: Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain [Hardcover]

Warren Neidich (Author), Norman Bryson (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2003

In Blow-Up, a collection of essays that tackle aesthetics from the angle of neuroscience, Warren Neidich proposes a different and wholly original paradigm for thinking through cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject. Across the theoretical landscape that Neidich describes, even familiar monuments from the history of art, architecture, philosophy and aesthetics appear strange and disorienting, because the starting point of the primary and secondary repertoires (the nervous system and the pathways of connection built up through interaction between the brain and the outside world) is so totally unexpected. Crucial to Neidich's narrative is the idea that, in modernity, the technologies that have evolved in the sphere of visual communication have come to operate on the subject with particular vehemence, not only in the realm of meaning but in their determining influence on the primary habits and dispositions of experience. Photography, cinema, television, the internet--as the forces of spectacle gain ever-wider currency in a rapidly globalizing world, those cultural forms that emerge as dominant in the competition for structuring the pathways of consciousness will annex and colonize more and more of the subject's interior life, worldwide. But Neidich suggests that the subject of culture has the ability to remap itself, rewire itself, and assume forms so creative and protean that it will always outrun the forces that seek to limit its plasticity--even trauma and amputation cannot irreversibly damage the neural body.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: D.A.P./UCR/California Museum of Photography (October 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891024809
• ISBN-13: 978-1891024801
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Oh, My Goodness---, January 11, 2009

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a reader in Cornwall NY (Cornwall, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Warren Neidich: Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (Hardcover)

Warren Neidich, photographer, has here authored a book that in itself rises to a new art form: the publication of writing that would--from logic to grammar--earn a solid F in freshman comp. To wit: abstruse claims lie completely unsubstantiated; language obfuscates meaning; examples are hacked up on the Procrustean bed to fit argument. Stunningly, the author claims the "structure" of this work is "spiral," thus relieving himself of the burden of ordered thought.

But let us transcend and move on as best we can. It seems the book's seminal argument is that the progress of visual technology has altered and continues to alter the individual's neural modes of perception--and thus, society's. Well, OK--please pass the butter? It would be lovely if the author's new contributions to this old saw were made accessible, thus gaining, perhaps, the recognition of both the scientific and art theory communities.

The great, abiding irony is that Neidich dispenses his wisdom from the [basically misunderstood here] Romantic perspective of The Artist--that of the visionary transmitting the hitherto not-perceived. Neither the world of art nor that of academe will grant Dr. Neidich the latitude he seeks to preempt in this self-indulgent book.