Alasdair King
Queen Mary, University of London, Film Studies, Faculty Member
- Film Aesthetics, German Cinema, Film-Philosophy, Philosophy of Film, Cultural Landscapes, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and 21 moreSiegfried Kracauer, Temporality in Cinema, Cinematic Space, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Berlin School, D. N. Rodowick, Christian Petzold, Cultural Political Economy, Political aesthetics, Critical finance, Aesthetics and Economy, Hito Steyerl, Finance Aesthetics, Landscape Cinema, Harun Farocki, Afrofuturism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Felix Guattari, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Video Artedit
- My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and film and media (especially but not exclusively in a Germa... moreMy research is interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and film and media (especially but not exclusively in a German context). My first monograph was on Hans Magnus Enzensberger, media, and democracy, and I'm preparing a monograph on financial time and space in contemporary moving image work.
I'm working currently on the ways that the moving image registers emerging systems of capital and finance, looking across narrative films, documentaries, moving image art and 'operational images'. I’ve published recently on film and financial time, on film and the financial city, and on documenting financial performativity. I've also written on moving image ethics in Deleuze and in Rancière, and publish regularly on contemporary German cinema, with a number of essays on Edgar Reitz, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Christoph Hochhäusler. I was a DAAD Visiting Researcher at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (2015).edit
Research Interests: Ethology, Globalization, Cinematic Space, Philosophy of Film, Cultural Landscapes, and 15 moreGilles Deleuze, Landscape Photography, German Cinema, Aesthetics and Ethics, Cinema, Film Aesthetics, Film Philosophy, Ethics and Film, Berlin Republic, Berlin School, Routledge, Theories of Landscape and Place, Cultural Concepts of Country, Environmental Ethics and Contested Country, and Christian Petzold
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Angela Schanelec’s recent film, Orly (2010) covers two hours in the airport, and relates five interleaving ‘stories’ that take place in public spaces and (almost) in real time. The unusually slow pacing appears to delay the narrative, and... more
Angela Schanelec’s recent film, Orly (2010) covers two hours in the airport, and relates five interleaving ‘stories’ that take place in public spaces and (almost) in real time. The unusually slow pacing appears to delay the narrative, and the film’s use of decelerated and still images allows for a specific focus on the inertia and experiences of time of the passengers. The tension between the contingent, uncontrolled and random phenomena caught by the camera and the precisely constructed encounters between actors, anchors the key concern raised by the film, namely how we experience and narrate events in time. Orly is a film about the chance encounters and significant moments that might determine how bonds are formed and how a life may be narrated through particular episodes and around specific cherished objects, particularly photographs. Orly explores different forms of intimacy, not least with the shadow of death that haunts several of the stories and which the moving and still image holds back, if only briefly, thus underscoring how contemporary cinema offers new affective possibilities in its encounter with the non-place (Augé) of the airport.
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In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To... more
In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To contextualise this approach, we offer a history of the Bloomberg Terminal alongside an analysis of the power of interfaces to shape both the user and the represented information. We use the terminal as a way to critique the relationship between art acquisition and financial trading companies. We then describe some outcomes of a series of workshops themed around the idea of ‘building an alternative Bloomberg’. We conclude by offering some potential applications of a re-framed Bloomberg Terminal as an open and modular interface for engaging with issues around art and finance, both in terms of content and curation.
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Despite growing interest in the last few years among filmmakers in tackling themes and stories related to the world of global finance, finding aesthetic means to depict the forces of contemporary capital has proven exacting. One route to... more
Despite growing interest in the last few years among filmmakers in tackling themes and stories related to the world of global finance, finding aesthetic means to depict the forces of contemporary capital has proven exacting. One route to understanding how the moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the way that specific financial hubs – significant banking cities that act as nodal points in the global economy in hosting major financial institutions and in initiating financial transactions – are registered on film. In this paper, I address the difficulties of constituting a financial aesthetic generally before looking at how the financial city plays a key role in allowing European filmmakers working across very different modes to find a material architectural representation for the abstract exchanges of contemporary finance capital. I discuss Isaac Julien’s gallery film, PLAYTIME (2014) that features the financial hubs of the City of London, Rekjavik and Dubai, and also recent films set in Frankfurt, the financial centre of the Eurozone and Germany’s leading financial hub, The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler, 2010) and the documentary, Master of the Universe (Marc Bauder, 2013).
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Contemporary Art, Documentary (Film Studies), Global cities, and 16 moreUrban Studies, Political aesthetics, German Cinema, Documentary Film, Film Aesthetics, Film and Architecture, Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, Global Financial Crisis, Financial Crisis, Isaac Julien, Critical finance, Eurozone crisis, Moving Image Art, Cities In Film and Literature, Critical Finance studies, and Finance Aesthetics
(forthcoming, 2016) in Journal of Cultural Economy Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading... more
(forthcoming, 2016) in Journal of Cultural Economy
Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistle-blower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.
Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistle-blower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.
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In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To... more
In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To contextualise this approach, we offer a history of the Bloomberg Terminal alongside an analysis of the power of interfaces to shape both the user and the represented information. We use the terminal as a way to critique the relationship between art acquisition and financial trading companies. We then describe some outcomes of a series of workshops themed around the idea of ‘building an alternative Bloomberg’. We conclude by offering some potential applications of a re-framed Bloomberg Terminal as an open and modular interface for engaging with issues around art and finance, both in terms of content and curation.
Keywords: Curation, interfaces, art market, open-source, representation, value,
Home > Vol 2, No 2 (2016) > Wood, King, Catlow and Scott
Terminal value: Building the alternative Bloomberg
Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, Brett Scott
Finance and Society, 2016, 2(2): 138-50.
DOI:
Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, Brett Scott
Finance and Society, 2016, 2(2): 138-50.
DOI:
Corresponding author:
Christopher Wood, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: c.p.wood@qmul.ac.uk
Keywords: Curation, interfaces, art market, open-source, representation, value,
Home > Vol 2, No 2 (2016) > Wood, King, Catlow and Scott
Terminal value: Building the alternative Bloomberg
Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, Brett Scott
Finance and Society, 2016, 2(2): 138-50.
DOI:
Christopher Wood, Alasdair King, Ruth Catlow, Brett Scott
Finance and Society, 2016, 2(2): 138-50.
DOI:
Corresponding author:
Christopher Wood, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: c.p.wood@qmul.ac.uk
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One route to understanding how the contemporary moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the emergence of neoliberalism as a political doctrine. For Foucault, this is not a phenomenon that is... more
One route to understanding how the contemporary moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the emergence of neoliberalism as a political doctrine. For Foucault, this is not a phenomenon that is conceived in 1970s Chile under Pinochet, or indeed in the 1980s in the US under Reagan and the UK under Thatcher. Foucault makes the case that the birth of neoliberalism, and consequently the birth of a new manifestation of biopolitics, comes in 1949 with the establishment of West Germany and with the debates around the constitutional formation of a political state that would have as its rationale the maintenance of a specific formation of economic liberalism. For Foucault, in his The Birth of Biopolitics lectures, West Germany sees the first manifestation of the radically economic state wherein the traditional legitimising relationship of political sovereignty and economic activity are formally reversed. How is this new state constituted in cinema? In this paper, I look at the representation of economics and power in Frankfurt, Germany’s financial hub, in the award-winning Das Mädchen Rosemarie (The Girl Called Rosemary, Rolf Thiele, Roxy Films, 1958). Thiele’s satirical film, a hybrid ‘musical tragedy’, attempts to find images and sounds to register the changing nature of power in the West Germany of the ‘economic miracle’. In its focus on Frankfurt, and in its formal complexity, it offers a pioneering yet accessible engagement with the difficulties of constituting a ‘financial aesthetic’.
Paper for the Political Screen conference, LSE/UCL/University of London Screen Studies Group, 19-20 June 2015
Paper for the Political Screen conference, LSE/UCL/University of London Screen Studies Group, 19-20 June 2015
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Research Interests: Ethology, Globalization, Cinematic Space, Philosophy of Film, Cultural Landscapes, and 15 moreFilm-Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Landscape Photography, German Cinema, Aesthetics and Ethics, Cinema, Film Aesthetics, Ethics and Film, Berlin Republic, Berlin School, Theories of Landscape and Place, Cultural Concepts of Country, Environmental Ethics and Contested Country, Christian Petzold, and Yella
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After achieving critical success as one of Germany’s leading contemporary film makers with his Gespenster/Ghosts trilogy (2000, 2005, 2007), Christian Petzold’s subsequent film, Jerichow (2008) has continued his interest in utilizing... more
After achieving critical success as one of Germany’s leading contemporary film makers with his Gespenster/Ghosts trilogy (2000, 2005, 2007), Christian Petzold’s subsequent film, Jerichow (2008) has continued his interest in utilizing genre conventions to explore the dynamics between his central characters, lost in the forgotten and empty spaces of post-unification Germany, this “Zwischendeutschland.” A loose adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and thus assuming a position in an enduring series of celebrated film adaptations of the novel in Hollywood and European cinema, Petzold’s film sets the ménage-à-trois in place in the depopulated landscape of northeastern Germany. With the inevitable crime playing out against the “immanent borderscapes that make up the heart of late capitalist Germany” (Abel 2008), Petzold’s use of genre cinema again raises questions about the economic and political settlement of Germany set against the urban and provincial spaces of late capitalism, and about the impossibility of returning home.
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Research Interests: Intellectual History, Cultural History, Cinematic Space, Cultural Landscapes, German Cinema, and 12 more20th Century German History, Aesthetics and Politics, Spatial Politics, Colour (Film Studies), Film Aesthetics, German Nationalism, The Third Reich, Nazi Cinema, Nazi Propaganda, Landscape Cinema, 1940s Cinema, and The Ideology of National Socialism and the Circulation of National Socialist Ideas In Europe
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at... more
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. British Library and Library of Congress ...
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To mark the centenary of cinema in 1995, a number of leading European newspapers decided to work together on their own 'co-production', an Imaginäres Museum des Kinos, a celebration of cinema with contributions from major... more
To mark the centenary of cinema in 1995, a number of leading European newspapers decided to work together on their own 'co-production', an Imaginäres Museum des Kinos, a celebration of cinema with contributions from major European artists and writers. The leading German ...