About the Author
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Thomas Y. Levin
Thomas Y. Levin teaches media theory and history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and aesthetics. His essays have appeared in October Grey Room, New German Critique, Screen, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Musical Quarterly, ARCH+, Cahiers du MNAM, and Texte zur Kunst. Levin has translated and/or edited three books on the work of the Frankfurt School theorist Siegfried Kracauer, including the critical edition of The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays(Harvard UP, 1995). He was part of the curatorial collective responsible for the first exhibition on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou, ICA London and the ICA Boston in 1989. Levin also conceived and curated the exhibition (CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother which opened at at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe in October 2001 and edited the catalogue under the same title (with Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel) published by MIT Press the following year. His more recent curatorial activities include "Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice" (Princeton University Art Museum, 2002), "911+1: The Perplexities of Security" (Watson Institute, Brown University, 2002) and "The Arts of the Future will be Radical Transformations of Situations, or They will be Nothing': Guy Debord Cineaste" (Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2006). He is currently working on two books, one on the recoding of narrative cinema in terms of surveillance, and the other on the film-theoretical cinema of Guy Debord.