Ina Blom

University of Oslo, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Faculty Member

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Professor at Dept of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. My fields of research are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art with a particular focus on media aesthetics and the relationship between art, technology, media and politics. I have directed NFR supported research project The Archive in Motion (2011-2015) in collaboration with media- and film scholars, and have previously taken part in the NFR-supported projects Aesthetics at Work (2003-2007) and Media Aesthetics (2004-2008). I am a member of the international editorial board of Art History, Journal of the Association of Art Historians (Wiley) and Konsthistorisk Tidsskrift (Routledge), and a contributor to Artforum, Parkett, Afterall and Texte zur Kunst. I have previously worked as a music critic and also done a number of curatorial projects. Most recent monographs: The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016), and On The Style SIte. Art Sociality and Media Culture (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007, 2nd edition 2009). Most recent edited books: Raoul Hausmann et les avantgardes (Paris, 2014), Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Recent articles/book chapters: "The Autobiography of VIdeo. Outline for a Revisionist Account of Early Video Art" (Critical Inquiry, WInter 2013), "Video and Autobiography vs. The Autobiography of Video", in Pasquinelli and Neidich (eds.) The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Berlin: Archive Books, 2014. Full list of publications on my UChicago and UiO homepages: https://arthistory.uchicago.edu/faculty/profiles/blom and http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/personer/vit/inabl/index.html

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Papers by Ina Blom

HOUSES TO DIE IN AND OTHER ESSAYS ON ART (Excerpt)

Houses to Die In and Other Essays on Art, 2022

Introduction and first chapter of collection of art critical essays

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Cornerstones

''Which artists have laid the foundations for contemporary cultural production? Between 2... more ''Which artists have laid the foundations for contemporary cultural production? Between 2008 and 2009, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art held a monthly lecture series, posing this very question to leading art historians and critics, each of whom was asked to speak on the work of an artist of their choosing. Engaging distinct methodologies - from personal interpretation and philosophical analysis, which tends to challenge the underlying premise in question, that of the centrality and nature of the individual artist - this rich collection of essays foreground an historical approach to the contemporary, all te while refusing the formation of a new canon. '' -- p. [4] of cover

Ambient Think Tanks

Art Journal, 2021

“Sensibilities,” “aesthetics,” “think tanks”— these are terms you rarely see combined in the same... more “Sensibilities,” “aesthetics,” “think tanks”— these are terms you rarely see combined in the same sentence or paragraph, although one might imagine such a turn of phrase in one of Joan Didion’s journalistic forays into the more arcane realms of politics. Yet the argument in Pamela M. Lee’s book is that, given the peculiar nature of think tanks, they actually should be. Using the terminologies typical of art and art history to describe a political institution might come across as fuzziness of the first order—but then again, the fuzzy or vague is precisely the point here. For while the “tank” in “think tank” conjures images of a contained, circumscribed entity, think tanks are in fact anything but. Originating in the mid-nineteenth century, they are extra-academic and parapolitical research institutions that became a prominent part of the American political and intellectual landscape during the Cold War era (today they are ubiquitous across the globe). Untroubled by the disciplinary mandates and scholarly claims to objectivity marking standard academic research, they carved out a new and highly ambiguous ground in which partisanship, realpolitik, experimentation, and eclecticism were harnessed to the project of problem solving and opinion forming within the larger fields of interest defined by their sponsors. They were, in short, political and institutional spearheads for the interdisciplinarity and boundlessness that also emerged as key aesthetic values in radical art production during the same period. However, in this study think tanks and artistic productions are not treated as parallel instantiations of the same set of ideas. What Lee documents, and in compelling detail, is the think tank as the site of a remarkable imbrication of art and politics, ambiguously united through a unique propensity for, and ability to operationalize, ambiguity as such. The object of this art historical study is therefore not works of art, or art “in context,” but rather a sensibility—a particular aesthetic orientation: hence the emphasis on the essentially ambient—one could even say atmospheric—character of the phenomena under discussion. It is, more specifically, a sensibility that underpins the development and increasing influence of neoliberal thought and that can only be traced by actually studying the murky political-strategic

"And Follow It". Straight Lines and Infrastructural Sensibilities

Critical Inquiry, 2019

In this essay, I present La Monte Young’s groundbreaking Composition 1960 #10 (Draw A Straight L... more In this essay, I present La Monte Young’s groundbreaking Composition 1960 #10 (Draw A Straight Line And Follow It), and the various permutations it engendered, across media and contexts, as a turning point in the longer history of straight lines in modern art and their relation to wider infrastructural conditions and changes. My argument is that Young’s work introduces a new and distinct form of infrastructural sensibility that may ultimately provide some points toward an archeology of a contemporaneity oriented around sensorial synchronization or alignment.

Books by Ina Blom

Introduction to The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016)

When artists first started to engage with the volatile and ephemeral forces of video technology, ... more When artists first started to engage with the volatile and ephemeral forces of video technology, they were grappling with phenomena that seemed to undermine human concepts of control, design, and memory—a technical corollary to avant-garde ideas of undoing authorial mastery and entering new media reality. But what if the critical question of early video art was no longer that of artistic control? What if the video signal and its microtemporal speeds could be seen to have purposes of their own, powers to unfold within an artistic setting that provided a different set of possibilities and constraints than the realm of TV production and broadcasting? What if video was not simply a technology used by artists, but an agent that deployed artistic frameworks, personnel, and competences in the process of exploring its own technical capacities? In such an account, video would no longer be a standardized operational system subtending a cultural layer of aesthetic, journalistic, or actionist content, but a multiplicity of temporal technical operations forging new associations or alliances with the surrounding world. It could be seen as a form of live memory in action, spurring on new forms of social reflection and organization—in short, new social realities. In this innovative text, Ina Blom traces the autobiography of video as enacted in the field of early analog video art. She documents, among other things, the becoming of video through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. This is a book about technology and social memory in the field of twentieth-century art.

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The Autobiography of Video. Outline for a Revisionist Account of Early Video Art

Critical Inquiry, 2013

Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017). (Preview: Contents and Introduction)

Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and Eiv... more Memory in Motion.
Archives, Technology and the Social
Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and
Eivind Røssaak.
Amsterdam University Press, 2016,
332 pages, 39 b/w illustrations.
ISBN:9789462982147

How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions, phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.

Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho.

Full book available for download in Open Access: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=619950;keyword=memory%20in%20motion

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