After Uniqueness

Reviews / Votes

If moving images are now consumed on more platforms than ever, what networks do they traverse to reach their audiences? What factors intervene to enable or restrict these passages? In After Uniqueness, Erika Balsom explores strategies that have changed our conceptual framework of how circulation functions today-what we mean by 'copy,' 'reproduction,' 'authenticity,' and 'authorship.' To explore this is to understand what moving images represent in our current world. An original, elegant, and impressively researched work. -- Francesco Casetti, Yale University Once only mechanically reproducible, all kinds of moving image art are now digitally copied and disseminated in innumerable apparatuses that were unimaginable forty years ago. Ranging in its references from eighteenth-century printmaking to UbuWeb, Balsom's brilliant and beautifully written book is a tour de force of scholarship and critical analysis that investigates the new forms of liberation and of control that ubiquitous copying offers. Its spirited intellection is exhilarating. -- David James, University of Southern California Balsom is at the forefront of a generation of scholars who focus on the history of film's relationship to the other arts-an enterprise that she terms, in the spirit of Andre Bazin, 'Where Is Cinema?' Her new volume is a timely addition that addresses the ubiquity of screens in contemporary art and examines, with her signature precision, the inner workings of the networks through which cinema now circulates. Indispensable reading! -- Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago