Between 1924 and 1929 the art historian Aby Warburg exhibited his collection of around 2,000 images organised in what he called a Mnemosyne Atlas. The last series of some 63 boards developed a radical argument through meanings generated by their affinity using the principles of 'good company'. This intellectual project was driven by the idea that a term such as the Renaissance was insufficient since it could not accommodate human knowledge as a practice. Only by rupturing the visual connections (as for example in the cinema) can the meaning of art as a collective memory emerge. Warburg's emphasis on the insufficiency of terms was his reaction to the epistemological consequence of the emphatic identity of disciplinarity. This paper will consider Warburg's work and elaborate his transdiciplinary method with the privilege of hindsight to argue that Modernism failed to meet the challenge of the twentieth century: to preserve the immaterial dimensions of human knowledge in a poetic form. In contrast it will explore how, for the better part of a century, the spiritual potential of subjecting established forms of argument to cognitively impenetrable fragmentation has garnered massive public support.

The paper will claim that at the intersection of science and art, the coalition of an enquiry into consciousness, cinema and technology, in which a flickering rupture displaces the master narratives of coherence, may rescue art practice from the epistemological margins of the twenty first century.



Author Bio
Michael Punt is a Reader in Digital Art and Technology at the Planetary Collegum, in the University of Plymouth and is Editor in Chief of Leonardo Reviews. He is a member of the Leonardo/ISATS Advisory Board, and the MIT/Leonardo Book Series Committee. He has made 15 films and published over eighty articles on cinema and digital media in the last decade. .He gained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam and his recent publications include a book-length study on early cinema, (Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, 2000) and regular articles on cinema history and digital technology for The Velvet Light Trap, Leonardo, Design Issues and Convergence. A full list of publications and exhibitions can be found at: http://www.people.i-dat.org.