Media Primitivism
eBook - PDF

Media Primitivism

Technological Art in Africa

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Media Primitivism

Technological Art in Africa

About this book

In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh's Ta'abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

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Yes, you can access Media Primitivism by Delinda Collier in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & History of Contemporary Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction. African Art History and the Medium Concept
  5. One. Film as Light, Film as Indigenous
  6. Two. Electronic Sound as Trance and Resonance
  7. Three. The Song as Private Property
  8. Four. Artificial Blackness, or Extraction as Abstraction
  9. Five. “The Earth and the Substratum Are Not Enough”
  10. Six. The Seed and the Field
  11. Afterword
  12. Color Plates
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index