I’ve just gotten my hands on an advance print copy of The New Lives of Images, and it looks and feels wonderful to hold and handle. I’m quite happy with what Stanford University Press has done with the book — the artwork, the typography, and the entire editorial and publication process was and is commendable. And being part of the Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media series is an honor.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a layered (two layers deep) table of contents — Stanford likes simplicity in that respect — so I thought I’d share that here. Note that the list of sub-headings does not exactly reflect the length of the respective chapters. The book’s first, theoretical “half” — a long essay on images and six “image regimes,” culminating in the digital — clocks in at a crisp 125 pages. The second, empirical half of the book, with its three lengthy and more-or-less-standalone investigations into the imaginal interface between contemporary humans and the earth (the Anthroposcene), humans and nonhuman animals (the Therioscene), and humans and our gods (the Theoscene), comes in at close to 200 pages. And there are nearly 60 pages of notes, and a 30-page index. Which makes it feel like a big book. I’m looking forward to the paperback, which should be out simultaneously with the cloth-bound and digital versions.
Chapter One can be read online. The book can be ordered here.
Preface
Part I — Images and Ecologies: From the Beginning to the Digital
1. The Image
- What is an Image?
- Process Semiotics
- Multisensorializing the Image
- Image Ecologies and Image Regimes
2. Five Image Regimes
- Animate-Image: The Image that Acts and Affects
- Ideal-Image: The Image that Reveals
- Expression-Image: The Image that Expresses
- World-Picture: The Image that Copies
- Moving-Image: The Image in Motion
3. The Digital Image-World
- The Data-Image: The Image Doubled and Operationalized
- Experiencing the Digital Image-World
- Political Economy and the Reality-Effect of Digital Media
- The Conditions of “Truth”
4. The Play of Imaginaries
- Imaginaries and Language
- Images, Materialities, and Enchantment Networks
- Psychodynamics of Image Relations
- Five Propositions, or Rules of Thumb
Part II — We Are Not Alone: (Post)Human Becomings in the Image-World
5. Anthroposcene
- -Cene or Not -Cene? Indexing the Scientists’ Anthropocene
- Anthropocene Seen: The Anthropocene Project
- Extending the Audience for Anthropo-Seeing
- Anthropocene Dissembled and Discorrelated: Akomfrah’s Montage-Image
- The Ocean of Purple
6. Therioscene
- Post-Cinemas of Animal Attractions
- Education and Entertainment on ZooTube
- Battles at Kruger
- Attacks, Rescues, and Other Close Encounters
- Staging Companionship
- Interspecies Friendships
- Wildlife Selfies, Visual Trophies, and Cecil the Lion
- In Pursuit of the Wild Sublime
- Photogénie of the Extended Zoo-Cine-Sensorium
7. Theoscene
- Are We Alone Yet?
- Theosophic Thought-Forms at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- Artist as Time Capsule: The Discovery of Hilma Af Klint
- Artist as Medium: Af Klint and the Creative-Image
- Mediumship Between the Ancestral and the Futural
- Sun Ra, Free Jazz, and the Afrofuturist Imaginary
- Music and Immanent Utopia
- The Semiotics of Divination and Magic
- Embodied Kinship, from Land to the Oceanic
- Dub Poetics: Gumbs’s Creative Divination of Relationalities
- Homecomings and Goings-Away
Afterimage: Animisms in the Mediocene
- The Promise and Peril of Digital “Intelligence”
- Regime Change: A Story
- Imagination, Between Animisms
Notes
Index
