Arguing that today's viewers move through a character's brain instead of looking through his or her eyes or mental landscape, this book approaches twenty-first-century globalized cinema through the concept of the "neuro-image." Pisters explains why this concept has emerged now, and she elaborates its threefold nature through research from three domains—Deleuzian (schizoanalytic) philosophy, digital networked screen culture, and neuroscientific research. These domains return in the book's tripartite structure. Part One, on the brain as "neuroscreen," suggests rich connections between film theory, mental illness, and cognitive neuroscience. Part Two explores neuro-images from a philosophical perspective, paying close attention to their ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions. Political and ethical aspects of the neuro-image are discussed in Part Three. Topics covered along the way include the omnipresence of surveillance, the blurring of the false and the real and the affective powers of the neo-baroque, and the use of neuro-images in politics, historical memory, and war.
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Patricia Pisters is Professor of Media Culture and Film Studies and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford, 2003).
Patricia Pisters is professor of media culture and film studies and chair of the department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She has published on film-philosophical questions on the nature of perception, the ontology of the image, on politics of contemporary screen culture and the idea of the “brain as screen” in connection to neuroscience. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003), Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values (ed. with Wim Staat; Amsterdam University Press, 2005) and Mind the Screen (ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008). During a fellowship at the IKKM (Internationales Kolleg fur Kulturtechnikforshung und Medienphilosophie) of the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2010 she finished the manuscript of a book entitled The Neuro-Image (forthcoming, Stanford University Press) about a new type of image in digital screen culture. In July 2010 she organized with Professor Rosi Braidotti the International Deleuze Studies Conference in Amsterdam on the (methodological) connections between art, science and philosophy, including a double exhibition and international public debate on this topic (www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl) and (www.thesmoothandthestriated.wordpress.com).
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