Author: Phil Turner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402032721
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in terms of the social relations of an extended group of actors that includes developers. Ethical and political issues are involved (cf f accountable computing). Writing broadly within this context, Day (chapter 11) proposes that the concept of 'surface' can assist us to explore space as the product of 'power and the affective and expressive role for materials', rather than the background to this. Surfaces are the 'variously textured...sites for mixtures between bodies', and are thus the 'sites for events'. The notions of 'folding' and 'foldability' and 'unfolding' are discussed at length, as metaphors that account for the interactions of bodies in space across time. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on ways in which we may experience multiple infrastructures. Dix and his colleagues, for example, in chapter 12 explore a complex of models - of spatial context, of 'mixed reality boundaries' and of human spatial understanding across a number of field projects that make up the Equator project to explain the ways in which co-existing multiple spaces are experienced.
Digital Uncanny
Author: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190853999
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as d j vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated digital technologies. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect," "feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship to each other and our experience of the world.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190853999
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as d j vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated digital technologies. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect," "feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship to each other and our experience of the world.
Spaces, Spatiality and Technology
Author: Phil Turner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402032721
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in terms of the social relations of an extended group of actors that includes developers. Ethical and political issues are involved (cf f accountable computing). Writing broadly within this context, Day (chapter 11) proposes that the concept of 'surface' can assist us to explore space as the product of 'power and the affective and expressive role for materials', rather than the background to this. Surfaces are the 'variously textured...sites for mixtures between bodies', and are thus the 'sites for events'. The notions of 'folding' and 'foldability' and 'unfolding' are discussed at length, as metaphors that account for the interactions of bodies in space across time. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on ways in which we may experience multiple infrastructures. Dix and his colleagues, for example, in chapter 12 explore a complex of models - of spatial context, of 'mixed reality boundaries' and of human spatial understanding across a number of field projects that make up the Equator project to explain the ways in which co-existing multiple spaces are experienced.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402032721
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in terms of the social relations of an extended group of actors that includes developers. Ethical and political issues are involved (cf f accountable computing). Writing broadly within this context, Day (chapter 11) proposes that the concept of 'surface' can assist us to explore space as the product of 'power and the affective and expressive role for materials', rather than the background to this. Surfaces are the 'variously textured...sites for mixtures between bodies', and are thus the 'sites for events'. The notions of 'folding' and 'foldability' and 'unfolding' are discussed at length, as metaphors that account for the interactions of bodies in space across time. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on ways in which we may experience multiple infrastructures. Dix and his colleagues, for example, in chapter 12 explore a complex of models - of spatial context, of 'mixed reality boundaries' and of human spatial understanding across a number of field projects that make up the Equator project to explain the ways in which co-existing multiple spaces are experienced.
Uncanny Networks
Author: Geert Lovink
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621878
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
"For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references." "The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. ... The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the internet, and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations."
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621878
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
"For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references." "The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. ... The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the internet, and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations."
The Visible Human Project
Author: Catherine Waldby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134688008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
The Visible Human Project examines how the VHP provides visual access to every organ of the body, viewable from every angle and capable of being manipulated to simulate living processes like respiration.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134688008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
The Visible Human Project examines how the VHP provides visual access to every organ of the body, viewable from every angle and capable of being manipulated to simulate living processes like respiration.
The Freudian Robot
Author: Lydia H. Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226486842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Liu’s innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious. Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226486842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Liu’s innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious. Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.
The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation
Author: Angela Tinwell
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 146658694X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Advances in technology have enabled animators and video game designers to design increasingly realistic, human-like characters in animation and games. Although it was intended that this increased realism would allow viewers to appreciate the emotional state of characters, research has shown that audiences often have a negative reaction as the human likeness of a character increases. This phenomenon, known as the Uncanny Valley, has become a benchmark for measuring if a character is believably realistic and authentically human like. This book is an essential guide on how to overcome the Uncanny Valley phenomenon when designing human-like characters in digital applications. In this book, the author provides a synopsis of literature about the Uncanny Valley phenomenon and explains how it was introduced into contemporary thought. She then presents her theories on its possible psychological causes based on a series of empirical studies. The book focuses on how aspects of facial expression and speech can be manipulated to overcome the Uncanny Valley in character design. The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation presents a novel theory that goes beyond previous research in that the cause of the Uncanny Valley is based on a perceived lack of empathy in a character. This book makes an original, scholarly contribution to our current understanding of the Uncanny Valley phenomenon and fills a gap in the literature by assessing the biological and social roots of the Uncanny Valley and its implications for computer-graphics animation.
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 146658694X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Advances in technology have enabled animators and video game designers to design increasingly realistic, human-like characters in animation and games. Although it was intended that this increased realism would allow viewers to appreciate the emotional state of characters, research has shown that audiences often have a negative reaction as the human likeness of a character increases. This phenomenon, known as the Uncanny Valley, has become a benchmark for measuring if a character is believably realistic and authentically human like. This book is an essential guide on how to overcome the Uncanny Valley phenomenon when designing human-like characters in digital applications. In this book, the author provides a synopsis of literature about the Uncanny Valley phenomenon and explains how it was introduced into contemporary thought. She then presents her theories on its possible psychological causes based on a series of empirical studies. The book focuses on how aspects of facial expression and speech can be manipulated to overcome the Uncanny Valley in character design. The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation presents a novel theory that goes beyond previous research in that the cause of the Uncanny Valley is based on a perceived lack of empathy in a character. This book makes an original, scholarly contribution to our current understanding of the Uncanny Valley phenomenon and fills a gap in the literature by assessing the biological and social roots of the Uncanny Valley and its implications for computer-graphics animation.
The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives
Author: Debra J. Bassett
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030916847
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of ‘the fear of second loss’. Bassett argues that digital afterlives challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors. But Bassett’s book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the ‘intentional’ Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett’s conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who wants to live forever?
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030916847
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
This book explores how social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp ‘accidentally’ enable and nurture the creation of digital afterlives, and, importantly, the effect this digital inheritance has on the bereaved. Debra J. Bassett offers a holistic exploration of this phenomenon and presents qualitative data from three groups of participants: service providers, digital creators, and digital inheritors. For the bereaved, loss of data, lack of control, or digital obsolescence can lead to a second loss, and this book introduces the theory of ‘the fear of second loss’. Bassett argues that digital afterlives challenge and disrupt existing grief theories, suggesting how these theories might be expanded to accommodate digital inheritance. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to sociologists, cyber psychologists, philosophers, death scholars, and grief counsellors. But Bassett’s book can also be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the ‘intentional’ Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) and their race to monetise the dead. This book provides an understanding of the profound effects uncontrollable timed posthumous messages and the creation of thanabots could have on the bereaved, and Bassett’s conception of a Digital Do Not Reanimate (DDNR) order and a voluntary code of conduct could provide a useful addition to the DAI. Even in the digital societies of the West, we are far from immortal, but perhaps the question we really need to ask is: who wants to live forever?
Capturing Digital Media
Author: Thomas J. Connelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501345877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
Why are filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino continuing to shoot their movies on celluloid in the digital age of cinema? Are these filmmakers choosing the photochemical process of celluloid images purely for aesthetics purposes? Or could their preference for celluloid have something to do with analogue's intimate connection to the subject of lack and desire? Capturing Digital Media: Perfection and Imperfection in Contemporary Film and Television examines the relationship between the perfection of the digital form and the imperfection of the human subject in recent film and television. Using a number of key psychoanalytic terms and new media concepts, Capturing Digital Media shows that the necessity of imperfection is where we locate the human subject of desire within the binary logic of the digital. It argues that the perfection of digital must be wounded by forms of imperfection in order to make media texts such as film and television desirable. But even as films and television texts incorporate forms of imperfection, digital perfection remains a powerful attraction in our engagement with moving images, such as high definition screens, spectacular digital effects, and state-of-the-art sound.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501345877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
Why are filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino continuing to shoot their movies on celluloid in the digital age of cinema? Are these filmmakers choosing the photochemical process of celluloid images purely for aesthetics purposes? Or could their preference for celluloid have something to do with analogue's intimate connection to the subject of lack and desire? Capturing Digital Media: Perfection and Imperfection in Contemporary Film and Television examines the relationship between the perfection of the digital form and the imperfection of the human subject in recent film and television. Using a number of key psychoanalytic terms and new media concepts, Capturing Digital Media shows that the necessity of imperfection is where we locate the human subject of desire within the binary logic of the digital. It argues that the perfection of digital must be wounded by forms of imperfection in order to make media texts such as film and television desirable. But even as films and television texts incorporate forms of imperfection, digital perfection remains a powerful attraction in our engagement with moving images, such as high definition screens, spectacular digital effects, and state-of-the-art sound.
X-Men
Author: Chuck Austen
Publisher: Marvel Entertainment
ISBN: 1302516604
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
Collects Uncanny X-Men (1981) #425-436; Exiles (2001) #28-30; material from X-Men Unlimited (1993) #40, 48. Juggernaut: hero? The unstoppable Cain Marko has joined the X-Men, but can they trust him? Meanwhile, Havok and Polaris are headed for the altar — but their wedding bells just might become a funeral dirge! As Jubilee and Husk mourn a fallen friend, the interdimensional Exiles arrive — but why are they targeting Havok? And the shocking truth about Nightcrawler’s parentage is revealed when Mystique returns…and the evil Azazel rises! What is Nightcrawler’s part in this villain’s master plan, and can he help the X-Men escape Azazel’s demonic dimension before Iceman loses his head?! Elsewhere, the Juggernaut takes on Alpha Flight — and finally faces up to his violent criminal past! Luckily, he’s got a gamma-powered lawyer on his side.
Publisher: Marvel Entertainment
ISBN: 1302516604
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
Collects Uncanny X-Men (1981) #425-436; Exiles (2001) #28-30; material from X-Men Unlimited (1993) #40, 48. Juggernaut: hero? The unstoppable Cain Marko has joined the X-Men, but can they trust him? Meanwhile, Havok and Polaris are headed for the altar — but their wedding bells just might become a funeral dirge! As Jubilee and Husk mourn a fallen friend, the interdimensional Exiles arrive — but why are they targeting Havok? And the shocking truth about Nightcrawler’s parentage is revealed when Mystique returns…and the evil Azazel rises! What is Nightcrawler’s part in this villain’s master plan, and can he help the X-Men escape Azazel’s demonic dimension before Iceman loses his head?! Elsewhere, the Juggernaut takes on Alpha Flight — and finally faces up to his violent criminal past! Luckily, he’s got a gamma-powered lawyer on his side.
Videogames and the Gothic
Author: Ewan Kirkland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000453103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture –neo-medieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the sense of a dark past impacting upon the present – have been appropriated by and transformed within digital games. Moving beyond the study of the generic influences of horror on digital gaming, Ewan Kirkland focuses in on the Gothic, a less visceral mode tending towards the unsettling, the uncertain and the uncanny. He explores the extent to which imagery, storylines and narrative preoccupations taken from Gothic fiction facilitate the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium. A core contention of this book is that videogames have developed as an inherently Gothic form of popular entertainment. Arguing for close proximity between Gothic culture and the videogame medium itself, this book will be a key contribution to both Gothic and digital game scholarship; as such, it will have resonance with scholars and students in both areas, as well as those interested in Gothic novels, media and popular culture, digital games and interactive fiction.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000453103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture –neo-medieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the sense of a dark past impacting upon the present – have been appropriated by and transformed within digital games. Moving beyond the study of the generic influences of horror on digital gaming, Ewan Kirkland focuses in on the Gothic, a less visceral mode tending towards the unsettling, the uncertain and the uncanny. He explores the extent to which imagery, storylines and narrative preoccupations taken from Gothic fiction facilitate the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium. A core contention of this book is that videogames have developed as an inherently Gothic form of popular entertainment. Arguing for close proximity between Gothic culture and the videogame medium itself, this book will be a key contribution to both Gothic and digital game scholarship; as such, it will have resonance with scholars and students in both areas, as well as those interested in Gothic novels, media and popular culture, digital games and interactive fiction.