Technoromanticism

Technoromanticism

Author: Richard Coyne

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780262531917

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The author explores the spectrum of romantic narrative that pervades the digital age, from McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic communications to the claims of cyberspace to offer new realities. Populating these narratives are cyborgs, computerized agents, avatars and characters that have putative digital identities.


New Romantic Cyborgs

New Romantic Cyborgs

Author: Mark Coeckelbergh

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0262343096

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An account of the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs. Romanticism and technology are widely assumed to be opposed to each other. Romanticism—understood as a reaction against rationalism and objectivity—is perhaps the last thing users and developers of information and communication technology (ICT) think about when they engage with computer programs and electronic devices. And yet, as Mark Coeckelbergh argues in this book, this way of thinking about technology is itself shaped by romanticism and obscures a better and deeper understanding of our relationship to technology. Coeckelbergh describes the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs. Coeckelbergh argues that current uses of ICT can be interpreted as attempting a marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism. He describes the “romantic dialectic,” when this new kind of material romanticism, particularly in the form of the cyborg as romantic figure, seems to turn into its opposite. He shows that both material romanticism and the objections to it are still part of modern thinking, and part of the romantic dialectic. Reflecting on what he calls “the end of the machine,” Coeckelbergh argues that to achieve a more profound critique of contemporary technologies and culture, we need to explore not only different ways of thinking but also different technologies—and that to accomplish the former we require the latter.


Pluralist Desires

Pluralist Desires

Author: Philipp Löffler

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1571139524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Excavates the contemporary revival of 19th-century cultural pluralism, revealing how American novelists since the 1990s have appropriated the historical novel in the pursuit of selfhood rather than truth, fundamentally repositioning the genre in American culture.


Metamorphoses of (New) Media

Metamorphoses of (New) Media

Author: Julia Genz

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1443887676

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The current success story of new media and the ongoing digitalisation of our world provide an illuminating starting point for the discussion of the powerful revolutions in our media and media uses initiated by the introduction of a(ny) ‘new’ medium: how do new media evolve and how do they relate to established, ‘old’ media and media uses? What does the rise of new media and media uses imply for other discourses? And not least: which methodological and theoretical approaches help us to understand these developments? Metamorphoses of (New) Media offers an international and interdisciplinary range of studies on these questions. In examining the effects of new media and media uses in fields such as social discourse, transmediality, and aesthetics, the essays in this collection engage with a great variety of examples, from political debate on Twitter to digital storytelling and the game-like experience of DVDs. What these diverse perspectives share, however, is an approach to Metamorphoses of (New) Media as an ongoing, recursive process of change that initiates dialogue and casts light on existing discursive, medial, and aesthetic models.


Derrida for Architects

Derrida for Architects

Author: Richard Coyne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-08-26

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1136723463

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jacques Derrida’s thinking is radical, provocative, controversial, and even difficult. This book looks afresh at Derrida’s thinking in relation to architecture. It simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. As well as a review of Derrida’s interaction with architecture, it is also a careful consideration of the implications of his thinking, particularly on the way architecture is practiced.


Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age

Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age

Author: Richard Coyne

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 9780262518949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Coyne examines the entire range of contemporary philosophicalthinking—including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology,critical theory, hermeneutics, and deconstruction—comparing them and showing how theydiffer in their consequences for design and development issues in electronic communications,computer representation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and multimedia.


Writing Machines

Writing Machines

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780262582155

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations.


Romantic Futures

Romantic Futures

Author: Evy Varsamopoulou

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1003808697

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics’ multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.


No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture

No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture

Author: Anastasia Karandinou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1317087151

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do digital media (mobile phones, GPS, iPods, portable computers, internet, virtual realities, etc.) affect the way we perceive, inhabit and design space? Why do architects traditionally design, draw and map the visual, as opposed to other types of sensations of space (the sound, the smell, the texture, etc.)? Architecture is not only about the solid, material elements of space; it is also about the invisible, immaterial, intangible elements of space. This book examines the design, representation and reception of the ephemeral in architecture. It discusses how architects map and examine the spatial qualities that these elements create and questions whether - and if so, how - they take them into account in the designing process. Karandinou argues that current interest in the ephemeral in contemporary culture and architecture is related to the evolution of digital media; and that it is related to the new ways of thinking about space and everyday situations that new media enables. With sound and video recording devices now being embedded in everyday gadgets and mobile phones, capturing sounds or ephemeral situations and events has become an everyday habit. New animation techniques allow designers to think about space through time, as they are able to design dynamic and responsive spaces, as well as static spaces explored by someone over time. Contemporary video games are no longer based on a simple visual input and a keyboard; they now involve other senses, movement, and the response of the whole body in space. This book therefore argues that the traditional binary opposition between the sensuous and the digital is currently being reversed. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool-to-think-with about space. Designers are now able to think through time, and design spaces accordingly. Time, temporality, ephemerality, become central issues in the designing process. The notion first claimed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, that the emergence of new di


Techno-Magism

Techno-Magism

Author: Orrin N. C. Wang

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2022-01-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0823298493

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.