Telesthesia

Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745653990
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The telegraph, telephone, and television, not to mention the Internet and mobile telephony, are all forms of communication that move information faster than the speed at which objects move. Both labor and capital and armies and commodities once moved at the same speed as the information organizing them. Over the last two centuries, social space has developed a strange folded quality, where physical space comes more and more to be doubled by a space of the movement of information. Telesthesia, or perception at a distance, comes increasingly to characterize how we see and hear and know the world. How does the evolution of different communication forms affect how we can perceive and act? How can the underlying infrastructure of communication forms be detected in the events of everyday life? These are the central questions animating this book. McKenzie Wark first explores relations between metropolitan and peripheral cultures – or postcolonial relations – with close attention to the texture of events that can happen when perception is mediated. He then examines what were once called postmodern experiences, and how relations of communication create new kinds of class relations and experiences of everyday life, from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street.

The Ecology of Attention

Author: Yves Citton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509503749
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Information overload, the shallows, weapons of mass distraction, the googlization of minds: countless commentators condemn the flood of images and information that dooms us to a pathological attention deficit. In this new book, cultural theorist Yves Citton goes against the tide of these standard laments to offer a new perspective on the problem of attention in the digital age. Phrases like paying attention and investing ones attention attest to our mistaken belief that attention can be conceptualized in narrow economic terms. We are constantly drawn towards attempts to quantify and commodify attention, even down to counting the number of 'likes' a picture receives on Facebook or a video on YouTube. By contrast, Citton argues that we should conceptualize attention as a kind of ecology and examine how the many different environments to which we are exposed – from advertising to literature, search engines to performance art – condition our attention in different ways. In a world where the demands on our attention are ever-increasing, this timely and original book will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications and in literary and cultural studies, and to anyone concerned about the long-term consequences of the profusion of images as well as digital content in the age of the internet.

Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age

Author: Christiane Lütge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000512436
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age addresses the growing significance of diversifying media in contemporary society and expands on current discourses that have formulated media and a multitude of literacies as integral objectives in 21st-century education. The book engages with epistemological and critical foundations of multiliteracies and related pedagogies for foreign language-learning contexts. It includes a discussion of how multimodal and digital media impact meaning-making practices in learning, the inherent potentials and challenges that are foregrounded in the use of multimodal and digital media and the contribution that (foreign) language education can provide in developing multiliteracies. The volume additionally addresses foreign language education across the formal educational spectrum: from primary education to adult and teacher education. This multifaceted volume presents the scope of media and literacies for foreign language education in the digital age and examples of best practice for working with media in formal language learning contexts. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of language teaching and learning, digital education, media education, applied linguistics and TESOL.

Metagaming

Author: Stephanie Boluk
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295416X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario, and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames—we make metagames.

Place Experience of the Sacred

Author: Christos Kakalis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819962145
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description

Fab Labs

Author: Laure Morel
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119318416
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
The digital economy is now expanding rapidly, and is starting to overturn the past achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Initially engaging in the world of services, it is now turning to the manufacture of objects. Just as microcomputing evolved from large scale computing to more personal use, and as the Internet left behind the world of armies and universities to become universal, industrial production is gradually becoming directly controlled by individuals. This appropriation is being done either on a personal level, or, more significantly, within local or planetary communities: Fab Labs. These digital fabrication laboratories offer workshops to members of the public where all sorts of tools are available (including 3D printers, laser cutters and sanders) for the design and creation of personalized objects. The bringing together of various users (amateurs, designers, artists, “dabblers”, etc.) and possibilities for collaboration lies at the heart of these open-access productive spaces. This book covers a range of advances in this new personal fabrication and various issues that it has raised, especially in terms of the alternatives to salaried work, intellectual property, ecological openings and the hitherto unseen structuring of societies.

The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia

Author: M. Hjort
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137070382
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
Practice-based film education is a crucial element in the institutional landscape of film. This book fills the gap in understanding practice-based film scholarship, focusing on Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Spectacular Posthumanism

Author: Drew Ayers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501340093
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

Drone Age Cinema

Author: Steen Ledet Christiansen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786720760
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
At a time when technological advances are transforming cultures and supporting new automated military operations, action films engage the senses and, in doing so, allow viewers to embody combat roles. This book argues that through film the viewer adapts to an ecology of fear, one that reflects global panic at the near-constant threat of conflict and violence. Often overwhelming in its audiovisual assault, action cinema attempts to overpower our bodies with its own through force and intensity. In this book, Steen Ledet Christiansen identifies five aspects central to how action films produce such physical movements and responses through vectors, droning, kinetics, telesomatics and volatility and in so doing unveils new modes of perception that acclimatise us for warfare. Drawing on theories from film-philosophy and a consideration of the aesthetics and phenomenology of war, this is an innovative study of the evolving action movie and its role in the targeted address of battle. Chapters investigate new modes of cinematic experience through in-depth case studies of Iron Man, Avatar and the Jason Bourne trilogy, through to The Hurt Locker and Mad Max: Fury Road. "

Becoming Political

Author: Christopher Skeaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655550X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.