Department Member, Interdisciplinary Studies
Thesis Title: The Impressive City Cantos
Robert Anderson
About
My academic interests reside somewhere between visual studies and technology studies. I am completing (very slowly) an interdisciplinary PhD in which I am using techniques of literary non-fiction to investigate recursive relations between, on the one hand, human bodies and consciousness—including, to a considerable degree, our very self-identity as human—and, on the other hand, technologies of material transformation enacted through the projection or anticipation of imprinting forces onto a specially-prepared surface.
There are numerous examples of such technologies: coins (generally imprinted with the face of a sovereign and thus symbolically awarded a small part of his or her authority); seals (to this day the impress in ink or wax of a representative symbol assures that the legal presence of the person affixing the seal accompanies foundational documents such as contracts wherever they may travel); plastics; asphalt (the special surface that was a key ingredient in the modern dominance of the automobile); or armaments (a kind of special case, a sort of research-and-development arm of impressive technology; as Virilio points out, the sightline of a gun barrel for a long time was called the ligne de foi, the line of faith, a phrase that points to the importantly metaphysical aspects of explosive projectiles impressing themselves on a soldier’s body or a fortress wall).
Even this cursory overview reveals that our relations with such technologies are complicated. Analysis is made even more difficult because intimate relationships with imprinted things are now so customary that they tend to be given a special weight, even to the point of conceiving of the real as that which makes an impression. This is however a convention or habit; the current ubiquity of the relations between being human and impressive technologies is a relatively modern development, although one with deep historical roots. As part of this conventional thinking, impressive materials are typically considered in terms of their substance (money is for exchanging; plastic dishes are for eating; artillery is for killing), but in the dissertation I ask a more Nietzschean question, transvaluing form and content as he so often did: what if the form of these materials is importantly causal; what if, that is to say, it is the forms of impression in themselves our society is after and the effects merely provide an excuse? Then the question becomes: what exactly is sought through deployments in impressive forms?
In search of answers to such questions I am focusing on concrete and photography because both are exemplarily impressive techno-material processes and self-evidently ubiquitous in urban development.
Over the past several years I have taught art history and communications courses at Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr University (Vancouver BC) and Western Washington University (Bellingham WA). I am also active in developing affordable housing and working spaces with and for those most disadvantaged by capitalist spectacle, including people at risk of homelessness, women fleeing violence and artists.
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