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Krapp, Peter
February 2nd, 2007 under Faculty

Associate Professor and Director of the Doctoral program in Visual Studies, UC Irvine; Program Faculty Member, Arts Computation Engineering, UC Irvine
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Peter KrappPeter Krapp is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies at UC Irvine, where he teaches new media and visual studies, focusing on digital culture and media theory. He is the author of Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004) and editor of Medium Cool, a collection of contemporary media theory (Duke Univ. Press, 2002: Southern Atlantic Quarterly 101:3). He is also the author of The Hydra theory pages on the Web. Currently Peter is completing a manuscript on what he calls the distraction economy: tracing attention and its deficits in discussing digital culture. In addition, he is co-editing two other volumes - one on film title sequences (the first book-length academic study of this important form between cinema, motion graphics, and computer animation), and one on critical media art and the concept of “defense” (the topic of an international conference at UC Irvine).


 Links:      Home page | The Hydra

 Quote:   
Distraction, attention deficit, or lack of concentration are common, in the visual field as well other fields of perception, as a defense against overstimulation; forces of habit or automatism are widely regarded as normal, as inference in the somatic field; and the peer group exerts an influence, creating a common libidinal bond which is a kind of suggestion … From the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, any appeal against forgetting is an attempt to dictate what people should think.

— Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004)

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The meeting of the machine and the body is an uneasy one. In the realm of performance, this uneasiness is reflected in the fact that, as technology has grown more and more sophisticated, the successful design of “instruments” that can be manipulated during performance with anything like the fluidity and intuition of conventional musical instruments has remained elusive. This failure, however, is not due to a lack of imagination on the part of artists, but a reflection in art of the uneasiness of the meeting of machine and body throughout culture today, which can be seen in every human activity: war, work, play, reproduction, and so on. How machines and bodies will co-exist is thus not a problem to be “solved,” but the central tension of our time in human history. Thus, it is a compelling terrain in which to locate art.
Bob Ostertag
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