Jody Berland

The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures

Virtual Menageries

Will Straw

David Tomas

In art theory, as in cultural life generally, there has a long been tension between theory and artistic practice. The desire to resolve these tensions has been a principal impulse shaping artistic work and criticism over the last century. The last decade has seen the emergence of a broad, interdisciplinary body of theoretical work with a distinctive relationship to artistic practice, providing a common reference in artworks to the principles and vocabularies of theory. The sixteen essays in this collection were originally presented at an international conference entitled `Art as Theory / Theory and Art,' held at the University of Ottawa in late 1991. The contributors - critics, curators, and practising artists from Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia, look at the current relationships between theory and practice in the fields of art, communication, and cultural studies from a wide range of viewpoints. Areas of interest include the institutionalization of theory, theories of vision, gender theory and feminist positions, and theory in a post-colonial context. This volume answers some important new questions about the points of intersection between theory and visual art.

Art as Theory, Theory and Art

Theory Rules

Martha Langford

David Hlynsky

The book presents 170 images, mainly shop window displays, shot by artist David Hlynsky during the final years of the collapsing Soviet empire in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany and Moscow, using a Hasselblad camera to capture the slow, undramatic moments of daily life on the streets. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynskys own account of his time as a flâneur in the shopping plazas behind the Iron Curtain.

Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain

Shelley Hornstein

Berland (humanities, York U., Canada) and Hornstein (art history, York U.) present 22 contributions that attempt to explore the connections between art and money in a world increasingly dominated by the practices and ideologies of market culture. Consisting of both essays and reproductions of art works, the contributions come from Canadian artists, academics, curators, and critics. Among the topics addressed in the essays are the relationship between nationalism and the value of art, a challenge to the universality of aesthetics, the erosion of artistic and educational freedoms, and cultural policy and funding in Canada. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Jody Berland

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