Contemporary art is often preoccupied with time, or acts in which the past is recovered. Through specific case studies of artists who strategically work with historical moments, this book examines how art from the last two decades has sought to mobilize these particular histories, and to what effect, against the backdrop of Modernism. Drawing on the art theory of Rosalind Krauss and the philosophies of Paul Ricoeur, Gerhard Richter, and Pierre Nora, Retroactivity and Contemporary Art interprets those works that foreground some aspect of retroactivity – whether re-enacting, commemorating, or re-imagining – as key artistic strategies. This book is striking philosophical reflection on time within art and art within time, and an indispensable read for those attempting to understand the artistic significance of history, materiality, and memory.

Digital art challenges archiving, collecting and preserving methods within and outside of gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) institutions. By its media, art in the digital sphere is processual, contextual, modular and ephemeral, and its creative process is collaborative. From artists, scholars, technicians and conservators—to preserve this contemporary art is a transdisciplinary task. This book brings together leading international experts from digital art theory and preservation, digital humanities, collection management, conservation and media art histories. In a transdisciplinary approach, theoretic and practice-based research from these stakeholders in art, research, education and exhibition are presented to create an overview of present preservation methods and discuss demands and opportunities for the future. Finally, the need for a new appropriate museum and archive infrastructure is shown to preserve the art of our time.

Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.

The age of digital culture has not only brought significant transformations in how we perceive memory, history, and heritage, but it has also raised pressing questions about authenticity and ownership of memory. The role of digital technologies in shaping collective identities is a topic of intense scrutiny. Moreover, contemporary societies grapple with complex issues in the politics of memory, especially with the proliferation of diverse narratives and the manipulation of public spaces. The book's content is therefore highly relevant, offering critical reflection and scholarly analysis to these societal challenges. Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment offers a comprehensive exploration of these issues, examining how contemporary practices of re-enactment intersect with digital contexts to shape our understanding of memory and heritage. The book analyzes the processes of memory creation and transmission in digital environments, providing a nuanced understanding of how memory is constructed, shared, and contested in the digital age. It also explores the role of arts-based research and participatory practices in documenting and preserving collective memories, offering insights into new forms of memory sharing and identity formation.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.

Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981--2022 is a new book about South Korean cinema in the private and independent sectors from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the methodologies of documentary studies, Korean studies, and local documentary discourse, author Jihoon Kim argues that what is unique about this forty-year history of South Korean documentary cinema is the intensive and compressed coevolution of activism aspiring to advocate democracy, progressiveness, and equality through alternative media, and post-activist experiments in documentary forms and aesthetics in the service of renewing the activist tradition.

Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere is the first interdisciplinary analysis of performance art in East, Central and Southeast Europe under socialist rule. By investigating the specifics of event-based art forms in these regions, each chapter explores the particular, critical roles that this work assumed under censorial circumstances. The artistic networks of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia are discussed with a particular focus on the discourses that shaped artistic practice at the time, drawing on the methods of Performance Studies and Media Studies as well as more familiar reference points from art history and area studies.

A proposal for a new media design to balance the contributions of humans and materials in the world they share. How can media design support a balance between our needs for self-expression and the material needs of the world we are part of? What criteria define a sustainable media ecology? In Vital Media, Michael Nitsche argues that the current human-centric view is not sustainable and that media are best viewed as dynamic networks where cognitive and noncognitive participants co-create. What we need, according to Nitsche, is a media design that balances the needs of all partners involved: vital media. Tracing this ideal through two domains of expression and making, performance and craft, Nitsche calls on us to embrace material co-existence and to design for self-expression as well as material evolution. We must recognize that the living body and its dependencies on the world around it are at the heart of what media are about. Vital media exist to not only help individuals fulfill their potential through expression but to also realize the agencies of materials in the equally active surrounding world. Throughout the book, Nitsche interweaves theory with close readings of actual artifacts that encompass predigital, nondigital, and hybrid examples. Nitsche’s approach counters the current tendency to pit the virtual media world against the reality in which we live.