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In much recent theory, the media are described as ephemeral, ubiquitous, and de-localized. Yet the activity of modern media can be traced to spatial centers that are tangible enough - some even monumental. This book offers multidisciplinary and historical perspectives on the buildings of some of the world's major media institutions. Paradoxically, as material and aesthetic manifestations of «mediated centers» of power, they provide sites to the siteless and solidity to the immaterial. The authors analyse the ways that architectural form and organization reflect different eras, media technologies, ideologies, and relations with the public in media houses from New York and Silicon Valley to London, Moscow, and Beijing.
Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.
Certain bizarre spaces, where disruption or disarray rule, leave us estranged and 'out of place'. This book examines such spaces, highlighting the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and the state of being 'in-between'; of cognitive displacement, loss, fear, or exhilaration. It expands on why space is sometimes estranging and for whom it is strange. It is the first book to link strangeness and spatial production, as well as empirical explorations of strange spaces within a profound theoretical discussion of 'what is strange about strange spaces' and how they evolve in a modern media age.
Value is seldom discussed in its own right, though it is of utmost importance to our relations with media texts and cultural objects, as we constantly make judgements of various kinds with respect to them. This book focuses on how value - aesthetic, political and social and economic value - is produced in contemporary media and cultural production. Contending that value is not constituted by the essence of a thing, but is rather produced in social relations, through negotiations and justifications, Value and the Media discusses changes in the cultural industries over the past two decades, emphasising the rise of new, digital media, and the opportunities that these afford for the production a...
How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies. Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where...
The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure. Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and ...
Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies,The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.
Covering diverse themes such as intellectual property, media and architecture, satellite debris, server farms and search engines, art installations, surveillance, peer-to-peer file-sharing, the construction of techno-history and much more, this book discusses both the culture of technology that we live in today, and culture as technology.
This 37th volume of the Yearbook of Women's History focuses on the meaning and potential of archiving for enhancing gender equality and the position of women worldwide. More than just storehouses of knowledge, archives offer new ways for understanding the past, debating the present and creating the future. Focusing on both traditional and non-traditional archival practices, in various parts of the world, the Yearbook of Women’s History explores the meaning of archiving for women and women’s history. Besides investigating the feminist potential of the archive, it also examines questions of erasure and forgetting. While archives may have emancipatory or democratizing potential, practices of discarding equally shape the histories that can be written, and the stories that can be told. The articles in this volume are alternated with descriptions of collections and institutes, and the topics addressed cover a full range of archival theory and practice. This volume has been produced by the editorial board of the Yearbook of Women's History in collaboration with Atria, institute on gender equality and women's history in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Emerging technologies eventually disappear into the atmosphere of everyday life – they become ordinary and enmeshed in ignored infrastructures and patterns of behaviour. This is how Mundania takes form. Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand our relationship with technology.