Abstract This article examines Cloud (2017), a sound art installation by Christina Kubisch that aims to make digital infrastructure audible. In works such as this one and the similar Electrical Walks series, Kubisch employs custom-built headphones that transform electromagnetic energy into sound, allowing listeners to hear the operation of the otherwise imperceptible network technologies of cloud computation. I consider Kubisch’s approach within the field of sound art and the legacy of John Cage and R. Murray Schafer that privilege hearing as a revelatory sense through which individuals can best perceive their embodied relationship to the physical environment. I argue that Cloud is indicative of a recent tendency to emphasize and figure the power of hearing to apprehend invisible systems of network infrastructures as exemplified in phenomenological and affective theories of digital media. I examine the shared conceptual lineage linking notions of aural and digital cultures in the crisis of visuality that was central to postmodern thought.

Abstract This article explores the role of emotion and affect in experimental cinema, using the films of Dziga Vertov as a case study. Emotion has been almost entirely overlooked in theories of experimental film and the avant-garde, even though emotions seem integral to many avant-garde works, including some canonical experimental films. This is especially true in the case of Vertov, whose cognitive goals have been the primary focus of scholarly attention, at least in the West. Yet, one of Vertov’s films is named after an emotion, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1930). Enthusiasm is defined as the intense enjoyment of, interest in, or approval of something, and in this article, I argue that Vertov’s films, especially Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Enthusiasm, are hardly dispassionate. Rather, they are suffused with enthusiasm and other emotions and affects, and I draw on contemporary philosophy and psychology of emotion to explain how they are designed with emotive goals in mind, not just cognitive ones. First, I explore how Vertov’s films elicit what Paul Silvia calls “knowledge emotions” such as interest, curiosity, anticipation, suspense, surprise, and confusion. Confusion, I suggest, isn’t just a cognitive but an emotional state, and it is one that is often exploited by Vertov and other avant-gardists. I then turn to Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s theory of another knowledge emotion, awe, to explain its role in Vertov’s films. Leaving knowledge emotions behind, I elucidate Vertov’s use of non-knowledge emotions like humor, as well as affects such as emotional contagion, the startle effect, and the flicker effect. Finally, I examine how his films employ the flicker effect to express ecstasy, as well as the role of emotions directed at their artifactual properties (such as their editing). Such artifact emotions, I suggest, can easily transfer onto the filmmaker himself, which is one reason why Vertov, like many other experimental filmmakers and avant-gardists, is celebrated and venerated.

Abstract Before Chris Marker became the elusive auteur behind La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), he was a sharp-witted, prolific film critic whose early writings mapped the intellectual terrain of postwar cinema. This essay, drawing on my translation of a newly available volume of his criticism (Chris Marker: Early Film Criticism, University of Minnesota Press, 2024), also sheds light on the little-known period of his activities during World War II. It traces how Marker, born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, subsequently sharpened his voice in the pages of Esprit and the newly launched Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. In dialogue with contemporaries like André Bazin and Joseph Rovan, both active in the Peuple et Culture and Travail et Culture educational movements, Marker positioned himself within, and against, the orthodoxies of the emerging French film culture. Reflecting on his essays on various films and the national cinemas of Germany, Mexico, and Hollywood, I trace the emergence of a distinctly international critical voice—profoundly allergic to the type of popular film writing focused on stars and the glitz of the film world. Attentive to the hope of a burgeoning women’s cinema, Marker crafted a sensibility that blurred politics and aesthetics, travel writing and philosophy, preparing the ground for his later cinematic experiments. Equally decisive was the still photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, and Robert Frank, and the rise of the photo book, which profoundly shaped his style. Far from being a secondary apprenticeship, Marker’s early film criticism (1948–1954) reveals a writer testing the ideas that would shape his films: time as montage, memory as collage, and the photo book as a template for cinematic form. In charting this passage “from pen to camera,” I place Marker in dialogue with Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 call for a caméra-stylo—a cinema written as personally as prose. His criticism, I argue, was not just commentary but the crucible in which he forged the sensibility that made him one of cinema’s most enigmatic, intriguing, and influential auteurs.

Abstract Benjamin Buchloh: I would like to focus on the formal procedures that structure your work—not the formal conventions of the given television material you analyze, but your own formal procedures. For example, how do you select, out of a one-hour program, three segments of ten seconds each? According to what criteria do you select these segments—to iconography, to dramatic action? Can we describe the actual structure of the tape as one might describe a painting or sculpture consisting of serialized elements or images? This ultimately leads to the question, In what way does your work relate to conventions of appropriation and the serial organization of found imagery, as, for example, in Warhol's painting?

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, drone videos of cities under lockdown were shared widely on global news and social media, drawing attention to the drone as an emergent technology of perception, witnessing, and artistic expression. Diverging from the majority of drone scholarship, which centers on its practical utility for warfare, surveillance, policing, and activism, this essay is interested in the drone as an aesthetic medium. Through the notion of the “spectacular drone,” I highlight the technology's ability to produce kinetic and affective spectacles. I argue that there is a need to explore, rather than foreclose, the drone's aesthetic potential through diverse articulations in pandemic drone media. The essay examines three attempts to evoke the spectacular drone in the documentation of lockdowns: a feature-length documentary directed by the renowned artist Ai Weiwei, Coronation, and two online videos that went viral in China—one during the initial Wuhan lockdown in 2020 and the other during the Shanghai lockdown in 2022. All three works try to incorporate drone spectacularity with varying degrees of success. By either critiquing the typical “drone's eye view” as distant and statist or failing at achieving “perfect” drone footage, these works affirm the street-level perspectives of ordinary citizens.

Abstract “On Collaboration” attempts to situate the withdrawal of support from the magazine Artforum (precipitated by the firing of its editor-in-chief David Velasco in October 2023) within a longer history of institutional antagonism. It compares strategies of opposition available to the avant-garde and counterculture in the 1960s (as exemplified by Fluxus's George Maciunas and the novelist Thomas Pynchon) with those that emerged in the 1970s, with particular attention paid to the machinery that sustained the appearance of the art world and, more broadly, the public sphere. Citing Vito Acconci's contributions to the exhibition ROOMS P.S. 1 (1976), it argues that much of what has been historically recognized as strategies of institutional opposition from the 1970s onward, including institutional critique and the alternative space movement, might be better understood within a framework of “institutional collaboration.”

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Abstract Longtime readers of October hardly need reminding that artist Michael Snow, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of ninety-four, was of singular importance to our journal, and especially to one of our founding editors, Annette Michelson. Michelson's first article devoted exclusively to a North American filmmaker “of the independent persuasion” was about Snow and especially his film Wavelength (1967), and this film in many ways exemplified the advanced art of the late 1960s and ‘70s that October was founded, in part, to defend and champion: art that was perceived as analytic rather than expressive; that expanded its medium even while hyperbolizing its defining conventions; that foregrounded temporality and duration; and that prompted cognitive reflection on the viewer's part about their phenomenological experience of the work and its possible sociopolitical ramifications.1 (In retrospect, the film is also notable for its humor, which, while not addressed in much depth at the time, was partly informed by the Duchampian legacy of puns and wordplay, often involving the titles of works, that also influenced October and its early canon of artists. Humor was to remain a major, but underappreciated, feature of Snow's work.) Snow first appeared in October in issue No. 4 (Autumn 1977), with his “Notes for Rameau's Nephew,” about his film Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), his contribution to the so-called New Talkie of the 1970s.2 The same issue contained an article by critic Amy Taubin, who had acted in Wavelength, about an exhibition of Snow's photographs at MoMA.3 Almost two years later, Michelson published in these pages her second major text on Snow, “About Snow,” in which she revisited Wavelength, but this time through the lens of a more politicized and psychoanalytically inflected version of phenomenology, which she took from French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry.4 Now, according to Michelson, the film affirms the spectator as “transcendental subject” by offering a “gratifying confirmation of a threatened sovereignty” to audiences, something that is even more true, Michelson argued, of Snow's film La région centrale (1970).5 Snow would feature in many subsequent essays published in the journal, including in a cluster of texts devoted to his work in issue No. 114 in 2005, among which was an interview with Snow conducted by Michelson about his work in music.6 He was also the subject of an October Files (No. 24) co-edited by Michelson and Kenneth White.

Abstract “Letters to the Editor and Other Comments” is a selection of comments the artist Morgan Fisher made on Facebook during Trump's presidency. Most were copies of letters he had sent to various departments at the New York Times criticizing its coverage of the president. They are “a record,” writes George Baker, “of an artist's engagement with a moment, one through which we have evidently still not passed. The practice … was almost daily, more or less constant, an insistent and repeated holding of the public sphere to account, perhaps even a willing of it into existence.”

Abstract Six works from the artist Mira Schor's open-ended series of handwritten defacements of the New York Times— most often of its front page—which she irregularly posts on Instagram. Varying in intensity, all have the same target: the way the language of the paper, aping “objectivity,” often tends toward obfuscation, which the artist regards as a dereliction of duty, a variety of Orwellian doublespeak that is much more subtle than what one might find on Fox News, making the debunking of its rhetoric all the more urgent.