Picture Cycle

A multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen.

In exchange for studying what each fraudulent cell looks like under a merciless commercial and commodified lens, viewers enable late-capitalism to run more smoothly by calling in with their votes, as is the case with Reality TV. From the inside, secrecy appears eradicated, as though secrets or coded transparencies comprise the totality of injustice, rather than just one part. Justice is reduced to a vantage point. We see and we see and we see ad infinitum.
--from Picture Cycle

With her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters (2007), Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melded film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn''s multigenre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten-year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and offscreen, predigital and postdigital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life''s biographies through images.

Masha Tupitsyn, a writer, critic, and multimedia artist, teaches film and literature at the New School. She is the author of Like Someone in Love: An Addendum to Love Dog, Love Dog, LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, and Beauty Talk & Monsters (Semiotext(e)e), and coeditor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. Her 24-hour film Love Sounds is an audio-essay and history of love in English-speaking cinema. Her ongoing essay film DECADES is a history of cinematic sound and scores organized by decade.

Kevin Killian was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977-1997.