Zoomscape
Zoomscape

Author: Mitchell Schwarzer

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2004-03

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9781568984414

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Although a few among us are intrepid architectural tourists, visiting buildings and landscapes our cameras at the ready, most of us experience architecture through the windshield of a moving vehicle, the architectural experience reduced to a blurry and momentary drive-by. And the rest of our architectural "tourism" is through the images of cameras, movies, and television programs -- that is, through the lens of another's eye. Architectural hisotrian Mitchell Schwarzer calls this new mediated architectural experience the "zoomscape." In this thought-provoking book, he argues that the perception of architecture has been fundamentally altered by the technologies of transportation and the camera -- we now look at buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and even entire continents as we ride in trains, cars, and planes, and/or as we view photographs, movies, and television. Zoomscape shows how we now perceive buildings and places at high speeds, across great distances, through edited and multiple reproductions. Nowadays, our views of the architectural landscape are modulated by the accelerator pedal and the remote control, by studio production techniques and airplane flight paths. Using examples from high art and popular culture -- from the novels of Don Delillo to the opening credits of The Sopranos -- Mitchell Schwarzer shows that the zoomscape has brought about unprecedented and often marvelous new ways of perceiving the built environment.

A Companion to Early Cinema
A Companion to Early Cinema

Author: André Gaudreault

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-07-02

Total Pages: 660

ISBN-13: 1444332317

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An authoritative and much-needed overview of the main issues in the field of early cinema from over 30 leading international scholars in the field First collection of its kind to offer in one reference: original theory, new research, and reviews of existing studies in the field Features over 30 original essays from some of the leading scholars in early cinema and Film Studies, including Tom Gunning, Jane Gaines, Richard Abel, Thomas Elsaesser, and André Gaudreault Caters to renewed interest in film studies’ historical methods, with strict analysis of multiple and competing sources, providing a critical re-contextualization of films, printed material and technologies Covers a range of topics in early cinema, such as exhibition, promotion, industry, pre-cinema, and film criticism Broaches the latest research on the subject of archival practices, important particularly in the current digital context

“You're Muted"
“You're Muted

Author: Mark Nunes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-07-11

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13:

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Through the frame of Zoom, this collection of essays examines the rapid emergence of videoconferencing in everyday life under COVID-19, its preexisting performative logic, and the ongoing implication of these practices for millions of individuals and institutions. The year 2023 marked the end of the World Health Organization's classification of the COVID-19 outbreak as a “public health emergency of international concern,” yet many of the organizational and institutional restructurings that occurred in the rapid response to the pandemic have remained firmly in place. The prevalence of videoconferencing in everyday life marks one such instance, not only highlighting the dramatic social and cultural transformations that occurred during a period of lockdowns, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders, but also serving as an index of all that has emerged as the “new normal” since March 2020. Overnight, it seemed, Zoom emerged as the default videoconferencing platform, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic. While this volume focuses predominantly on Zoom and its place in the collective imagination and daily practice of those of us whose lives are profoundly caught up in digital networks, many of these insights presented here apply to other videoconferencing platforms as well, and a supporting logic that has governed neoliberal lives since long before the first lockdowns began. The twelve chapters in this collection explore how videoconferencing platforms in general, and Zoom in particular, have provided individuals and institutions new modes of “engagement,” while at the same time reifying, normalizing, and domesticating modes of surveillance, control, and marginalization that have been part and parcel of a networked-based performative logic for nearly a century.

Mobile Screens
Mobile Screens

Author: Nanna Verhoeff

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 9089643796

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"Nanna Verhoeff's new book is a must for anybody interested in visual culture and media theory. It offers a rich and stimulating theoretical account of the central dimension of our contemporary existence--interfacing and navigating both data and physical world through a variety of screens (game consoles, mobile phones, car interfaces, GPS devices, etc.). In the process of exploring these new screen practices, Verhoeff offers fresh perspectives on many of the key questions in media and new media studies as well as a number of new original theoretical concepts. As the first theoretical manual for the society of mobile screens, this book will become an essential reference for all future investigations of our mobile screen condition.--Lev Manovich."--Publisher's description.

Writing the Stage Coach Nation
Writing the Stage Coach Nation

Author: Ruth Livesey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0191082252

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Why is it that so many of the best-loved novels of the Victorian era take place not in the steam-powered railway present in which they were published, but in the very recent past? Most works by Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Hardy set action neither in the present nor in a definitively historical epoch but rather in a 'just' past of collective memory, a vanishing but still tangible world moving by stage and mail coach. It is easy to overlook the fact that Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, for example, are in this sense historical novels, recreating places and times that are just slipping from the horizon of here and now. Ruth Livesey brings to the surface the historical consciousness of such novels of the 'just' past and explores how they convey an idea of a national belonging that can be experienced through a sense of local place. The journey by public coach had long been an analogy for the form of the novel as it took shape in the eighteenth century; smooth engineered roads and the rapid circulation of print was one means by which Britain was reimagined as a modern, peaceable, and communicative nation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. But by the later 1840s the end of the stage coach was assured and that made it a highly charged figure of a lost national modernity. In its halts, relays, stops at inns, and crossing points, the stage and mail coach system offered a different experience of mobility and being-in-place—passages of flight and anchoring points—from the vectors of the railway that radiated out from industrial and urban centres. This book opens by examining the writing of the stage coach nation in Walter Scott's fiction and in the work of the radical journalists William Hazlitt and William Cobbett. Livesey suggests that in turning to the 'just' past of the stage coach imaginary, later novels by Dickens, Brontë, and Eliot reach out to the possibility of a nation knitted together by the affect of strongly felt local belonging. This vision is of a communicative nation at its liveliest when the smooth passage of characters and words are interrupted and overset, delivering readers and protagonists to local places, thick with the presence of history writ small.