High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure maps an archaeology of failure in a culture seemingly ill-equipped to deal with it. To better understand failure, Kane argues, we must abstract from our subjective, personal disappointments and see them as meaningful symbols of a broader human struggle. By connecting twenty-first century digital aesthetics to critical issues in the history o…
An examination of the use of digital badges as a reward for both casual online music evaluators and professional musicians.Professional and amateur musicians alike use social media as a platform for showcasing and promoting their music. Social media evaluation practices—rating, ranking, voting, “liking,” and “friending” by ordinary users, peers, and critics—have become essential pro…
"What does it mean when a hit that knocks an American football player unconscious is cheered by spectators? What are the consequences of such violence for the participants of this sport and for the entertainment culture in which it exists? This book brings together scholars and sport commentators to examine the relationship between American football, violence and the larger relations of power w…
Through a rigorous quantitative/qualitative discourse analysis - never before undertaken in relation to online fanfiction and its reception - Fanfiction and the Author demonstrates how fanfic relating to Sherlock, Game of Thrones and Supernatural works to change and consolidate the discourses of masculinity, authority, and authorship created through these TV texts. As a result, this book innova…
This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone’s personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Ston…
"Han Hyung-mo was a major figure within South Korea’s Golden Age cinema. The director of Madame Freedom (1956), the most famous film of the 1950s, Han made popular films that explored women’s relationship to modernity. He was also a master stylist who introduced technological innovations and fresh ideas about film form and genre into Korean cinema. This book offers a transnational cultural …
By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in …
Are the humanities still relevant in the twenty-first century? In the context of pervasive economic liberalism and shrinking budgets due to a deep and prolonged recession, the exigency of humanities research for society is increasingly put into question. This volume claims that the humanities do indeed matter by offering empirically-grounded critical reflections on contemporary cultural practic…
Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its possibilities in an imagined environment or construct. But as Roberte Hamayon shows in this book, play has implications that go even further than that. Exploring play’s man…
Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemp…
In contrast with media constructed as vast, ontologically homogeneous, non-localized systems, formats show material networks of interoperability and exclusions, inscribed in local specificities, and involving precise conditions for the circulation of images and sounds. Formats, institutionalized as standards, frame the “technical networks” defined by Gilbert Simondon, that unfold technical …
This spirited exploration of the interfaces between art and theory in the 21st century brings together a multidisciplinary range of viewpoints on their future. The authors examine contemporary visual culture based on speculative predictions and creative scientific arguments. Focusing on seven themes - Future Tech, Future Image, Future Museum, Future City, Future Freedom, Future History, and Fut…
Good design is enabling, and each and every one of us is a designer. Universal Design is widely recognized an important concept that should be incorporated in all person-centred policies. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) clearly stipulates that the most effective way of delivering on the promise of an inclusive society is through a Universal Desi…
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music …
Over time Dutch and Indonesian musicians have inspired each other and they continue to do so. Recollecting Resonances offers a way of studying these musical encounters and a mutual heritage one today still can listen to. Readership: All those willing to learn more about the impact and consequences of musical encounters between Dutch and Indonesian performers in both a colonial and postcolonial …
Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all t…
We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such 'staged sounds' express the changing identities of cities? This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such a…
Global Animation Theory offers detailed and diverse insights into the methodologies of contemporary animation studies, as well as the topics relevant for today’s study of animation. The contact between practical and theoretical approaches to animation at Animafest Scanner, is closely connected to host of this event, the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb. It has given way to aca…
This new edition of Núñez’s Anthropocosmic Theatre contains the text of the original English translation plus additional contributions from Núñez and others. In part one, Núñez traces his researches in Nahuatlan, Tibetan and western theatre, to arrive at his design for a theatre of the human in the cosmos. Part Two explores how this work has developed, during the last three decades, int…
Late 19th-century Britain experienced an explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are p…
This volume draws together essays by leading art experts observing the dramatic developments in Asian art and exhibitions in the last two decades. The authors explore new regional and global connections and new ways of understanding contemporary Asian art in the twenty-first century.
Film criticism is in crisis. Dwelling on the many film journalists made redundant at newspapers, magazines, and other 'old media' in past years, commentators have voiced existential questions about the purpose and worth of the profession in the age of WordPress blogospheres and proclaimed the 'death of the critic'. Bemoaning the current anarchy of internet amateurs and the lack of authoritative…
Installation art has become mainstream in artistic practices. However, acquiring and displaying such artworks implies that curators and conservators are challenged to deal with obsolete technologies, ephemeral materials and other issues concerning care and management of these artworks. By analysing three in-depth case studies, the author sheds new light on the key concepts of traditional conser…
The genres of sung tales that are the subject of this volume are one of the most striking aspects of the cultural scene in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Composed and performed by specialist bards, they are a highly valued art form. From a comparative viewpoint they are remarkable both for their scale and complexity, and for the range of variation that is found among regional genres and indivi…
How is performativity shaped by digital media – and how do performance practices themselves reflect and alter techno-social configurations? Performing the Digital inquires into the technological terms and conditions of performance and performance studies, and maps and theorizes the registers of performance at work in digital cultures. The contributions range from the performativity of algorit…
This book is an outcome from a five year Australian Research Council funded research project, CAMRA cultural asset mapping in regional Australia project (LP0882238). Over this time four universities, four local governments, and peak regional, state and federal agencies sought to develop knowledge that would enable better informed planning for arts and cultural development in rural and regional …
This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rap…
Contemporary music, like other arts, is dealing with the rise of »curators« laying claim to everything from festivals to playlists - but what are they and what do they do anyway? Drawing from backgrounds ranging from curatorial studies to festival studies and musicology, Brandon Farnsworth lays out a theory for understanding curatorial practices in contemporary music, and how they could be a …
In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape Elizabeth A. Cecil presents a spatial and material history of the Pāśupata tradition and examines the formation of a Śaiva religious landscape in Early Medieval India. Readership: All interested in the history of Hinduism, and particularly the worship of the god Śiva, in premodern India; scholars of early medieval history and society in South Asia, and th…
This book proposes an overview of the researches initiated in 2015 in the Design PhD programme of Politecnico di Milano. All of them explore the implications of the ongoing digital transformations, from the specific perspective of design research. Throughout the book, the cultural, organisational, social, and managerial issues raised by digital technology, are debated and how such issues call f…