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Such machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production, and they make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds of new reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions of Postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such processes often tends to slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic representation of content -- into narratives which are about the processes of reproduction and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum. (The shift from Antonioni modernist Blow-Up to DePalma postmodernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects, for example, model a building on the decorative imitation of stacks of cassettes, then the solution is at best thematic and allusive, although often humorous.

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Info: A section of Antonioni's 1966 film "Blow-Up"
Original Url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q62gRiUrylw
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Info: Blow-up / Michelangelo Antonioni / 1966
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Info: Blow-up / Michelangelo Antonioni / 1966
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Info: Blow-up / Michelangelo Antonioni / 1966
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Such machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production, and they make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds of new reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions of Postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such processes often tends to slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic representation of content -- into narratives which are about the processes of reproduction and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum. (The shift from Antonioni modernist Blow-Up to DePalma postmodernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects, for example, model a building on the decorative imitation of stacks of cassettes, then the solution is at best thematic and allusive, although often humorous

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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
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Info: Blow out / Brian De Palma / 1981
Original Url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXrdzKWuxI
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