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…
When the Mahabharata and Ramayana are performed in South and Southeast Asia, audiences may witness a variety of styles. A single performer may deliver a two-hour recitation, women may meet in informal singing groups, shaddow puppets may host an all-night play, or professional theaters may put on productions lasting thirty nights. Performances often celebrate ritual passages: births, deaths, mar…
The twentieth century has spawned a great interest in Indonesian music, and now books, articles, and manuscripts can be found that expound exclusively about karawitan (the combined vocal and instrumental music of the gamelan). Scholar Judith Becker has culled several key sources on karawitan into three volumes and has translated them for the benefit of the Western student of the gamelan traditi…
Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space explores how street theatre transforms industrial space into postindustrial space. Deindustrializing communities have increasingly turned to cultural projects to commemorate industrial heritage while simultaneously generating surplus value and jobs in a changing economy. Through analysis of French street theatre companies working out of …
With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a ‘stable’ moment in media history? *Inventing Cinema* proposes to approach this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines. The archaeology analyses them…
In a world where the notion of home is more traumatizing than it is comforting, artists are using this literal and figurative space to reframe human responses to trauma. Building on the scholarship of key art historians and theorists such as Judith Butler and Mieke Bal, Claudette Lauzon embarks upon a transnational analysis of contemporary artists who challenge the assumption that ‘home’ is…
In the wake of Glasgow’s transformation in the nineteenth-century into an industrial powerhouse — the "Second City of the Empire" — a substantial part of the old town of Adam Smith degenerated into an overcrowded and disease-ridden slum. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan’s photographic record of this central section of the city prior to its demolition in accordance wit…
The historiography of the Great War has been significantly renewed in recent years, yet, despite its crucial social, economic, and cultural importance, the role that fashion played in shaping wartime experiences and economies has not yet been addressed. This collection fills this gap in the literature by examining the impact the Great War had on fashion, its industry, and civilians in a transna…
How can performing be transformed into cognition? Knowing in Performing describes dynamic processes of artistic knowledge production in music and the performing arts. Knowing refers to how processual, embodied, and tacit knowledge can be developed from performative practices in music, dance, theatre, and film. By exploring the field of artistic research as a constantly transforming space for pa…
This book is made up of contributions dealing with heritage stones from different countries around the world. The stones are described, as well as their use in vernacular and contemporaneous architecture. Heritage stones are those stones that have special significance in human culture. Examples include some very important stones that have been either neglected because they are no longer extract…
Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, music history has to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st centuries. Christian Utz…
As a reaction to the dominant effect and interpretive authority of the digital, Data Loam combines radical approaches based on positions taken in the international practice of contemporary art. Previously: insistence on indexicality and the instrumental reduction of knowledge. Instead: a new metric that requires play, curiosity, experiment, and risk. As an urgent response to the continually …
The same computer games are played by youths all over the world, and worldwide games become matters of concern in relation to children: worries rise about addiction, violence, education, time, and economy. Yet, these concerns vary depending upon where they are situated: in families, legal contexts, industry or science. They also play out differently across countries and cultures. This situated …
'China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception' is the first book to explore how Chinese and Western musical materials and traditions—those involving instruments, melodies, rhythms, staged diversions (including operas and musical comedies), concert works, film scores, and digital recordings of several kinds—have gradually moved closer together and become increasingly accepted, as…
"This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume compri…
Music of the Baduy People of Western Java: Singing is a Medicine by Wim van Zanten is about music and dance of the indigenous group of the Baduy, consisting of about twelve-thousand people living in western Java. It covers music for rice rituals, for circumcisions and weddings, and music for entertainment. The book includes many photographs and several discussed audio-visual examples that can b…
Increasingly, technology is at stake in toys, games and playing. With the immense popularity of computer games, questions concerning the role and function of technology in play have become more pressing. A key aspect of the increasing technologization and digitalization of both toys and play is the vagueness of borders between producers, consumers and players. In these so-called participatory c…
This is the first study to examine in detail ritual objects known as ‘Lamak’, a fascinating and unique form of ephemeral material culture which is a prominent feature of Balinese creativity. A lamak is a long narrow ritual hanging that is an essential requirement at almost all rituals in Bali. It is hung from altars and shrines at temple festivals and on festive holy days. Made usually of p…
Among our most cherished modern assumptions is our distance from the material world we claim to love or, alternately, to dominate and own. As both devotional tool and art object, the Byzantine icon is rendered complicit in this distancing. According to well-established theological and scholarly explanations, the icon is a window onto the divine: it focuses and directs our minds to a higher unde…
In 1591, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published his Della simmetria dei corpi humani, an Italian translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion. While Dürer’s treatise had been translated earlier in the sixteenth-century into French and Latin, it was Gallucci’s Italian translation that endured in popularity as the most cited version of the text in later Baroque treatises, cov…