Social Media Archeology and Poetics
Social Media Archeology and Poetics

Author: Judy Malloy

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-08-16

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 026233688X

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First person accounts by pioneers in the field, classic essays, and new scholarship document the collaborative and creative practices of early social media. Focusing on early social media in the arts and humanities and on the core role of creative computer scientists, artists, and scholars in shaping the pre-Web social media landscape, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents social media lineage, beginning in the 1970s with collaborative ARPANET research, Community Memory, PLATO, Minitel, and ARTEX and continuing into the 1980s and beyond with the Electronic Café, Art Com Electronic Network, Arts Wire, The THING, and many more. With first person accounts from pioneers in the field, as well as papers by artists, scholars, and curators, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents how these platforms were vital components of early social networking and important in the development of new media and electronic literature. It describes platforms that allowed artists and musicians to share and publish their work, community networking diversity, and the creation of footholds for the arts and humanities online. And it invites comparisons of social media in the past and present, asking: What can we learn from early social media that will inspire us to envision a greater cultural presence on contemporary social media? Contributors Madeline Gonzalez Allen, James Blustein, Hank Bull, Annick Bureaud, J. R. Carpenter, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Anna Couey, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Steve Dietz, Judith Donath, Steven Durland, Lee Felsenstein, Susanne Gerber, Ann-Barbara Graff, Dene Grigar, Stacy Horn, Antoinette LaFarge, Deena Larsen, Gary O. Larson, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Richard Lowenberg, Judy Malloy, Scott McPhee, Julianne Nyhan, Howard Rheingold, Randy Ross, Wolfgang Staehle, Fred Truck, Rob Wittig, David R. Woolley

Social Media Archeology and Poetics
Social Media Archeology and Poetics

Author: Judy Malloy

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-08-19

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 0262034654

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First person accounts by pioneers in the field, classic essays, and new scholarship document the collaborative and creative practices of early social media. Focusing on early social media in the arts and humanities and on the core role of creative computer scientists, artists, and scholars in shaping the pre-Web social media landscape, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents social media lineage, beginning in the 1970s with collaborative ARPANET research, Community Memory, PLATO, Minitel, and ARTEX and continuing into the 1980s and beyond with the Electronic Café, Art Com Electronic Network, Arts Wire, The THING, and many more. With first person accounts from pioneers in the field, as well as papers by artists, scholars, and curators, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents how these platforms were vital components of early social networking and important in the development of new media and electronic literature. It describes platforms that allowed artists and musicians to share and publish their work, community networking diversity, and the creation of footholds for the arts and humanities online. And it invites comparisons of social media in the past and present, asking: What can we learn from early social media that will inspire us to envision a greater cultural presence on contemporary social media? Contributors Madeline Gonzalez Allen, James Blustein, Hank Bull, Annick Bureaud, J. R. Carpenter, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Anna Couey, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Steve Dietz, Judith Donath, Steven Durland, Lee Felsenstein, Susanne Gerber, Ann-Barbara Graff, Dene Grigar, Stacy Horn, Antoinette LaFarge, Deena Larsen, Gary O. Larson, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Richard Lowenberg, Judy Malloy, Scott McPhee, Julianne Nyhan, Howard Rheingold, Randy Ross, Wolfgang Staehle, Fred Truck, Rob Wittig, David R. Woolley

Film History as Media Archaeology
Film History as Media Archaeology

Author: Thomas Elsaesser

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9048529964

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Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the 'death of cinema' debate, Film History as Media Archaeology presents a robust argument for the cinema's current status as a new epistemological object, of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in the museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction, as we experience them today.

Ecstatic Worlds
Ecstatic Worlds

Author: Janine Marchessault

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0262549743

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When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen's “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau's underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller's geoscope. Postwar artists and architects have used photography, film, and other media to imagine and record the world as a wonder of collaborative entanglement—to translate the world for the world. In this book, Janine Marchessault examines a series of utopian media events that opened up and expanded the cosmos, creating ecstatic collective experiences for spectators and participants. Marchessault shows that Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” photography exhibition, for example, and Jacques Cousteau’s 1956 underwater film Le monde du silence (The Silent World) both gave viewers a sense of the earth as a shared ecology. The Festival of Britain (1951)—in particular its Telekinema (a combination of 3D film and television) and its Live Architecture exhibition—along with Expo 67’s cinema experiments and media city created an awareness of multiple worlds. Toronto’s alternative microcinema CineCycle, Agnès Varda’s 2000 film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game (geoscope), representing ecologies of images and resources, encouraged planetary thinking. The transspecies communication platform the Dolphin Embassy, devised by the Ant Farm architecture collaborative, extends this planetary perspective toward other species; and Finnish artist Erkki Kurenniemi’s “Death of the Planet” projects a postanthropocentric future. Drawing on sources that range from the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marchessault argues that each of these media experiments represents an engagement with connectivity and collectivity through media that will help us imagine a new form of global humanism.

Voicetracks
Voicetracks

Author: Norie Neumark

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0262553287

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The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts. Moved by the Aboriginal understandings of songlines or dreaming tracks, Norie Neumark's Voicetracks seeks to deepen an understanding of voice through listening to a variety of voicing/sound/voice projects from Australia, Europe and the United States. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories of sound, animal, and posthumanist studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with the assemblages of living creatures, things, places, and histories around us. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works she examines—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing human, animal, thing, and assemblages. She engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. She writes about remixes, the Barbie Liberation Organisation, and breath in Beijing, about cat videos, speaking fences in Australia, and an artist who reads (to) the birds. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.

Virtual Menageries
Virtual Menageries

Author: Jody Berland

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-11-26

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0262553430

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The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

A Biography of the Pixel
A Biography of the Pixel

Author: Alvy Ray Smith

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0262365219

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The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story. The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel--a particular packaging of bits--conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels--cell phone pictures, app interfaces, Mars Rover transmissions, book illustrations, videogames. In A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith argues that the pixel is the organizing principle of most modern media, and he presents a few simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making. Smith's story of the pixel's development begins with Fourier waves, proceeds through Turing machines, and ends with the first digital movies from Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. Today, almost all the pictures we encounter are digital--mediated by the pixel and irretrievably separated from their media; museums and kindergartens are two of the last outposts of the analog. Smith explains, engagingly and accessibly, how pictures composed of invisible stuff become visible--that is, how digital pixels convert to analog display elements. Taking the special case of digital movies to represent all of Digital Light (his term for pictures constructed of pixels), and drawing on his decades of work in the field, Smith approaches his subject from multiple angles--art, technology, entertainment, business, and history. A Biography of the Pixel is essential reading for anyone who has watched a video on a cell phone, played a videogame, or seen a movie. 400 pages of annotations, prepared by the author and available online, provide an invaluable resource for readers.

Giving Bodies Back to Data
Giving Bodies Back to Data

Author: Silvia Casini

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0262362201

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An examination of the bodily, situated aspects of data-visualization work, looking at visualization practices around the development of MRI technology. Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In this book, Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image--and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization. Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists' body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen's biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.

Design in Motion
Design in Motion

Author: Laura A. Frahm

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 0262045184

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The first comprehensive history in English of film at the Bauhaus, exploring practices that experimented with film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium.” With Design in Motion, Laura Frahm proposes an alternate history of the Bauhaus—one in which visual media, and film in particular, are crucial to the Bauhaus’s visionary pursuit of integrating art and technology. In the first comprehensive examination in English of film at the Bauhaus, Frahm shows that experimentation with film spanned a range of Bauhaus practices, from textiles and typography to stage and exhibition design. Indeed, Bauhausler deployed film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium,” malleable in shape and form, unfolding and refracting into multiple material, aesthetic, and philosophical directions. Frahm shows how the encounter with film imbued the Bauhaus of the 1920s and early 1930s with a flexible notion of design, infusing painting with temporal concepts, sculptures with moving forms, photographs with sequential aesthetics, architectural designs with a choreography of movement. Frahm considers, among other things, student works that explored light and the transparent features of celluloid and cellophane; weaving practices that incorporate cellophane; experimental films, social documentaries, and critical reportage by Bauhaus women; and the proliferation of film strips in posters, book covers, and other typographic work. Viewing the Bauhaus’s engagement with film through a media-theoretic lens, Frahm shows how film became a medium for “design in motion.” Movement and process, rather than stability and fixity, become the defining characteristics of Bauhaus educational, aesthetic, and philosophical ethos.

Tactics of Interfacing
Tactics of Interfacing

Author: Ksenia Fedorova

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0262044153

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How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices. In Tactics of Interfacing, Ksenia Fedorova explores how digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world. With the advent of ubiquitous computing, the self becomes an object of technological application, increasingly defined by data received from tracking technologies. Subtly, these technologies encourage versions of ourselves that are easier to interpret computationally. Fedorova views these shifts in self-perception through the lens of contemporary media art practices, examining a range of artistic tactics that enable embodied and intimate experiences of machinic operations on our lives. At the center of Fedorova's analysis are the mechanisms that structure the relations between the self and the world at the level of the interface; she considers “interfacing” a process in which interrelation happens and different agencies play off against each other. She discusses such topics as interfaciality and the face as a medium; self-image and the boundaries of the self, understood through technological mediation of an embodied experience; the relation between the self and the other, reshaped by algorithmic technologies; and the augmentation and alteration of spatial perception. The artworks Fedorova discusses present scenarios of interfacing that range from responsive environments to artificial intelligence conversational agents. She shows that art and aesthetic experience offer fruitful ways to reflect on the effects of contemporary technological culture, enabling encounters that shift our perspectives on the boundaries of the self and challenge the very capacity to feel human.