Medium Philosophicum: para Un Pensamiento Tecnológico del Arte (2023, Spanish)
Desde los experimentos tempranos con la videoinstalacion en los 90, hasta la huella creciente de la interfaz digital en el arte interactivo, los medios artisticos digitales no han cesado de florecer en las últimas décadas y se han situado en un espacio central en la reflexion sobre el arte y la imagen en el mundo contemporáneo. A través de un profundo diálogo con el pensamiento francés (Marin, Lyotard, Derrida o Deleuze) y de una atencion a ciertas exposiciones y eventos fundamentales de los últimos años, Timothy Murray analiza con brillantez algu nas obras centrales del arte de los nuevos medios y replantea la manera de entender la performance, la subjetividad y la ar chivística en el contexto actual del biopoder…
Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art (2022)
Seeing new media art as an entry point for better understanding of technology and worldmaking futures
Brilliantly conceived and argued and eloquently written, Technics Improvised points the way to how artistic and theoretical practice can seize on the improvisational accidents of technics to activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.
Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008)
Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts. Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts’ dialog with early modern concepts. Sophisticated readings reveal the electronic psychosocial webs and digital representations that link text, film, and computer. Murray puts forth an innovative Deleuzian psychophilosophical approach—one that argues that understanding new media art requires a fundamental conceptual shift from linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal fields intrinsic to the digital form.
Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (1999, Spanish)
La muestra Zona de contacto. El arte en CD.ROM, curada por Timothy Murray, tuvo como objetivo explorar las posibilidades que el soporte del CD-ROM ofrecía a los creadores de imágenes y artes digitales. Diseñada como una suerte de repositorio de programas almacenados en el formato del disco compacto, accesible a través de computadoras dispuestas en el Centro de la Imagen, la muestra buscó también poner en crisis la noción de soledad como experiencia única en la interacción con un ordenador
Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video and Art (1998)
Timothy Murray examines the artistic struggle over traumatic fantasies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Establishing a retrospective dialogue between past and present, stage and video, Drama Trauma links the impact of trauma on recent political projects in performance and video with the specters of difference haunting Shakespeare’s plays.
Mimesis, Masochism Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997)
In this stimulating collection of theoretical writings on film, photography, and art, Timothy Murray examines relations between artistic practice, sexual and racial politics, theory and cultural studies.
In the first collection of its kind, Timothy Murray brings together writing by leading French thinkers on the political effects of theatricality on theater, film, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In addition to recently translated work by Cixous and Deleuze, the collection features English translations of essays by Althusser, Derrida, Durand, Fanon, Féral, Foucault, Girard, Green, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, and Marin.
Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas (1993)
In this stimulating collection of theoretical writings on film, photography, and art, Timothy Murray examines relations between artistic practice, sexual and racial politics, theory and cultural studies.
Like a Film investigates how the cinematic apparatus has invaded the theory of culture, suggesting that the many destabilising traumas of our culture remain accessible to us because they are structured so much like film. The book analyses the impact of cinematic perceptions and productions on a wide array of cultural practices: from the Renaissance works of Shakespeare and Caravaggio to modern sexual and political fantasy; and the theoretical work of Lyotard, Torok, Barthes, Ropars-Wuilleumier, Zizek, Silverman and Laplanche.
Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-century England and France (1987)
In Theatrical Legitimation, Timothy Murray provides a post-structural analysis of three frameworks of 17th-century dramatic and literary criticism: authorship, patronage, and spectatorship. Discussing a wide range of primary materials from England and France—including dedicatory epistles, title pages, anti-theatrical tracts, and art treatises—Murray reflects on different strategies of “legitimating” theater, all illustrating the period’s broader ideological concern with the “allegory of genius.” Following introductory remarks linking “legitimation” to “allegory,” Murray’s detailed discussion of Ben Jonson and his folio reveals how printing contributed to conventions of authorial constancy and genius. He then moves on to an analysis of patronage that focuses on Richelieu and French written portraiture, arguing that the legitimation of theater memorialized historical personages as “textual figures.” Finally, Murray demonstrates that French aesthetic theories fueled by the legitimation of drama ultimately dwell not on authorship or patronage, but on figures of spectatorship, desire, and the sublime.
About
A Professor of Comparative Literature and Literatures in English, Timothy Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Curator of the Cornell Biennial, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and co-moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv. A curator of contemporary art and theorist of the cinematic and digital arts, he is Chair of the Board of Directors of Humanities New York, and sits on the Executive Committee of HASTAC. He is a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, PI of Cornell’s Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, and Foreign PI in the Global Research Network of the National Research Foundation of Korea. He is the author of Medium Philosophicum: para un pensamiento tecnológico del arte (Murcia/CENDEAC, 2023), Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art (Minnesota, 2022), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed., Mimesis, Masochism Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. with Shin-Yi Yang, Xu Bing’s Background Stories (Life Bookstore Publishing, Mandarin), and ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998). His curated exhibitions include the 2022 Cornell Biennial, “Futurities, Uncertain,” 2020 Cornell Biennial, “Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality,” 2018 Cornell Biennial, “Duration: Passage, Persistance, Survival,” Cornell Library’s 2016 “Signal to Code: Fifty Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive,” Hunter College Art Galleries’ 2015 “Experimental Television Center: ETC…,” CTHEORY Multimedia (2000-2003), and “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” touring from 1999-2004.