Toni Pape
At the University of Amsterdam, I am affiliated with the Television and Cross-media team and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. I received my PhD from the Université de Montréal in 2014.
My main interests concern media aesthetics and process philosophy. Combining the two interests, my work addresses the political dimension of contemporary media aesthetics. For example, my book Figures of Time (Duke 2019) investigates how the nonlinear temporalities of recent television series align with a politics of preemption. My current project, entitled "The Aesthetics of Stealth," investigates modes of disappearance in video games, television series, and contemporary art. Parts of this research have been published in Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Television and Jump Cut (all open access).
I am a co-editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (open access) and the 3Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press (open access).
At the Department of Media Studies, I teach courses in cross-media aesthetics and storytelling, video game studies, process philosophy, and media history.
My main interests concern media aesthetics and process philosophy. Combining the two interests, my work addresses the political dimension of contemporary media aesthetics. For example, my book Figures of Time (Duke 2019) investigates how the nonlinear temporalities of recent television series align with a politics of preemption. My current project, entitled "The Aesthetics of Stealth," investigates modes of disappearance in video games, television series, and contemporary art. Parts of this research have been published in Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Television and Jump Cut (all open access).
I am a co-editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (open access) and the 3Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press (open access).
At the Department of Media Studies, I teach courses in cross-media aesthetics and storytelling, video game studies, process philosophy, and media history.
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Books by Toni Pape
This collective project is animated by a shared curiosity in the pragmatics of fabulation and its speculative gesture of bringing forth a people to come. In an encounter with Apichatpong’s cinematic dreamscape, the concepts of ecology, vitality and opacity emerge to articulate an ethos of fabulation that deframes experience, recomposes subjectivity and unfixes time.
Ce projet collectif est animé d’un intérêt commun pour la pragmatique de la fabulation et son geste spéculatif générateur d’un peuple à venir. Les concepts d’écologie, de vitalité et d’opacité ont surgi de la rencontre avec le dreamscape d’Apichatpong pour venir articuler un ethos de fabulation qui décadre l’expérience, recompose la subjectivité et défixe le temps.
Edited collections by Toni Pape
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Toni Pape
How does one teach a text about movement, about a dance or a performance? How can one do justice to both the achievement of the author and the work that her text discusses?
It is easy to conceive of what should happen in a classroom following a model of communication, that is, in terms of the transmission of knowledge from an informed instructor to a student. The instructor tells the students what can be said and known about artist X or artwork Y; the student dutifully takes notes and, ideally, retains the information. This model of education certainly has its advantages: it allows for the scope of education to be measured in terms of the content transmitted; it also integrates much more easily with a reorganization of higher education according to a logic of exchange, in this case of knowledge and information. “You can download the slides on Blackboard [or Moodle, Canvas, etc.]”: the refrain of quick exchange in education. At the same time, knowledge and information in their exchangeable form are easily accessible on the internet, on Wikipedia for instance. What, then, is the singular project of higher education that stands out from a mass of knowledge traders?
What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal’s “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily-attending to the situation itself. This paper explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work’s ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance’s anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal’s work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations – as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance’s propensity to always begin again. This commitment to rebeginning is what we term Sehgal’s impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles/ Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London/New York: Verso.
Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London/New York: Verso."
This collective project is animated by a shared curiosity in the pragmatics of fabulation and its speculative gesture of bringing forth a people to come. In an encounter with Apichatpong’s cinematic dreamscape, the concepts of ecology, vitality and opacity emerge to articulate an ethos of fabulation that deframes experience, recomposes subjectivity and unfixes time.
Ce projet collectif est animé d’un intérêt commun pour la pragmatique de la fabulation et son geste spéculatif générateur d’un peuple à venir. Les concepts d’écologie, de vitalité et d’opacité ont surgi de la rencontre avec le dreamscape d’Apichatpong pour venir articuler un ethos de fabulation qui décadre l’expérience, recompose la subjectivité et défixe le temps.
How does one teach a text about movement, about a dance or a performance? How can one do justice to both the achievement of the author and the work that her text discusses?
It is easy to conceive of what should happen in a classroom following a model of communication, that is, in terms of the transmission of knowledge from an informed instructor to a student. The instructor tells the students what can be said and known about artist X or artwork Y; the student dutifully takes notes and, ideally, retains the information. This model of education certainly has its advantages: it allows for the scope of education to be measured in terms of the content transmitted; it also integrates much more easily with a reorganization of higher education according to a logic of exchange, in this case of knowledge and information. “You can download the slides on Blackboard [or Moodle, Canvas, etc.]”: the refrain of quick exchange in education. At the same time, knowledge and information in their exchangeable form are easily accessible on the internet, on Wikipedia for instance. What, then, is the singular project of higher education that stands out from a mass of knowledge traders?
What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal’s “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily-attending to the situation itself. This paper explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work’s ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance’s anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal’s work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations – as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance’s propensity to always begin again. This commitment to rebeginning is what we term Sehgal’s impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles/ Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London/New York: Verso.
Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London/New York: Verso."
The essay has been republished in Barbara Glowczewski, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.