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An examination of digitality not simply as a technical substrate but also as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity. Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control, Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the “information economy” possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined threads: the relat...
Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism Seb Franklin sets out a media theory of racial capitalism to examine digitality’s racial-capitalist foundations. The Digitally Disposed shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Reading archival and published material from the cybernetic sciences alongside nineteenth-century accounts of intellectual labor, twentieth-century sociometric experiments, and a range of literary and visual works, The Digitally Disposed locates the deep history of digitality in the...
An engaging consideration of what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology have challenged the centrality of the human amid the uneven temporality of postwar capitalism. Experimental music addresses this condition, Barrett contends, not by adhering to the formal strictures of musical modernism but by producing extra-formal meaning through its immanent transdisciplinary involvements with postwar science, technology, and art movements. Hear Alvin Lucier use his brain waves to play percussion. Picture Pamela Z sculpting the sound...
A critical account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference, which Michel Foucault called “the last countercultural event of the 1960s,” and its direct and indirect connection to American experimental literature.
An international array of human rights advocates, scholars, and survivor-writers examine the profound and complex impact of personal testimony about human rights abuses as expressed through autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater.
This book presents a new methodology, ludonarrative synchronicity, to analyze the interplay between narrative and gameplay in video games. Using the BioShock franchise as a case study, this book aims to show the interaction of these two elements can form various subjects. Rather than prioritizing one over the other, ludonarrative synchronicity seeks to explore how video game texts function. By analyzing a trio of games focused on choice and control, this book manages to show how players, along with developers, can create their own subjects. Ludonarrative Synchronicity in the BioShock Trilogy will appeal not only to fans of the franchise, but to students and scholars of narrative theory, game design, and posthumanism.
A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look ...
An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. "Telepresence” allows us to feel present—through vision, hearing, and even touch—at a remote location by means of real-time communication technology. Networked devices such as video cameras and telerobots extend our corporeal agency into distant spaces. In Here/There, Kris Paulsen examines telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. Paulsen traces an arc of increasing interactivity, as video screens became spaces for communicati...
An intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s. Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are le...
A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.