UC New Media Research Directory
Spieker, Sven
May 16th, 2007 under Faculty

Associate Professor, Comparative Literature Program, Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, Department of History of Art and Architecture, UCSB
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Sven SpiekerSven Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to the visual arts and aesthetic theory in Eastern and Central Europe. At UCSB he specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar and contemporary literature and art (especially in Eastern and Central Europe), and media history. Spieker’s recent graduate seminars have included a seminar on the digital image at the intersection of art and science. In 2005, Spieker organized a two-day conference devoted to the same issue at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Spieker is the editor of a collection of essays on the uses of the administrative bureaucracy and its media in art and literature (Leidenschaften der Bürokratie: Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv. Berlin, 2004). His most recent publication is The Big Archive. The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of the Bureaucracy (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2008). The book deals with analogue archives in art and science, mapping a conceptual field that allows us to say with greater precision where the boundary between analogue and digital archives might fall. For more information, visit Spieker’s web page.

 Links:      Home page | ARTMargins

 Quote:   
Could we say though that in some sense the real archive is the map or the algorithm itself, and not the images we see on the screen? Isn’t the algorithm the equivalent of, say, the signatures in a library that tell you where to find a certain book?
“Interview with George Legrady” in ARTMargins



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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.
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