1. Living Hieroglyphs: Artaud and the Image.- 1.1 A Universe and a Theatre of Signs.- 1.2 Shedding Light on Hieroglyphic Language.- 1.3 Aby Warburg's Expressivity Without Subject and Eisenstein in Mexico.- 1.4 Hieroglyps as Fields of Force.- 1.5 The Originality of Artaud in 20th Century Heiroglyphics.- 2. The Power of Capture: New Media and the Social Hieroglyph.- 2.1 Inner/Outer.- 2.2 Cybernetic Totality.- 2.3 Brain Matter.- 2.4 Sorcery without Sorcerers.- 2.5 Hieroglyphic Keys.- 2.6 Body withour Organs as Substrate of Existence.- 3. Beyond Hieroglyphics: I.- 3.1 'The Body is the Self', or Godard's incommensurable.- 3.2 'Impossible' influence.- 3.3 Grandrieux's Cinema of Cruelty.- 3.4 Grandieux and Sade.- 3.5 Contructing the new 'body'.- 4. Beyond Hieroglyphics: II.- 4.1 Klossowski's Body Exchange.- 4.2 The Body Remixed- Stelarc.- 4.3 Catastrophy Theory in Gary Hill.- 4.4 'The Infinite, This is Me.- 4.5 Schizophrenia as Interactive Cinema.- 4.6 Another 'Outside'.- 5. Don't Forget the Virtual.
Jay Murphy is author of Artaud’s Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016); he has contributed to CTheory, Art Journal, Deleuze Studies, Studies in European Cinema,Parallax, Culture Machine, Frieze, MAP, Afterimage, Parkett, Art in America, Metropolis, and Third Text, among many other publications. He was editor of the alternative journal Red Bass, his interviews for that publication with figures such as John Cage, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Emile de Antonio, Edward Said and Kathy Acker have been anthologized and republished. He has thrice been a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriting Labs, and his collaborative Internet projects have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
This book proposes, following Antonin Artaud, an investigation exploring the virtual body, neurology and the brain as fields of contestation, seeking a clearer understanding of Artaud's transformations that ultimately leads into examining the relevance Artaud may have for an adequate theory of the current media environment.
The Artaud Effect is the only current full-length study of the relation of Artaud’s work to dilemmas of digital art, media and society today. It is also singular in that it combines a far-reaching discussion of the theoretical implications and ramifications of the ‘late’ or ‘final’ Artaud, with a treatment of individual media works, sometimes directly inspired from Artaud’s travails.
Artaud has long been justly regarded as one of the seminal influences in mid- and late-20th century performance and theater: it is argued here that Artaud’s insights are if anything more applicable to digital/post-digital society and the plethora of works that are made possible by it.