Book review: Marit Paasche and Judy Radul (eds), A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics

Date01 May 2014
Published date01 May 2014
AuthorKate West
DOI10.1177/1362480613506641
Subject MatterBook reviews
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
Marit Paasche and Judy Radul (eds), A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and
Aesthetics
, Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2011; 275 pp., 14 b/w and 37 colour
illustrations: 9781934105665 (pbk), €25.00
Reviewed by: Kate West, University of Oxford, UK
A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics is an interdisciplinary anthol-
ogy edited by art historian Marit Paasche and video installation artist Judy Radul.
Published by Berlin/New York-based publisher, Sternberg Press, with the support of the
Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, the volume marks the occasion of Radul’s large-scale
media exhibition, ‘World Rehearsal Court’.1 Through the contribution of internationally
renowned artists and scholars, A Thousand Eyes assesses how the aesthetics and spatial
arrangements of new media technologies affect the court of law. The idea unifying the
anthology’s essays is the court’s permeability to the world outside. The court depends on
architecturally and hermeneutically excluding the outside world. However, its trials are
increasingly staged on screen, relying on a burgeoning range of new (representational)
media technologies, bringing what was outside, in. The essays in the volume interpret the
court, and the photographs, video and audio recordings brought within its confines,
according to their correlates in contemporary art, cinema and mass media.
Sociologist Richard Mohr begins from the premise that the court’s architectural bor-
ders have, since Ancient Greece, been patrolled and protected from the profanities of
the outside world. Mohr considers how new media technologies challenge the court’s
architectural borders. Scholar of Russian theatre and cinema, Julia Cassiday and docu-
mentary filmmaker, Eyal Sivian, explore the performative constitution of the court.
Cassiday explores how the success of Soviet show trials depended on disguising their
avant-garde theatrical nature, whilst Sivian explores how video...

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