The Marvelous Clouds

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The Marvelous Clouds

Author : John Durham Peters
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780226421353

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The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters Pdf

Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies,The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.

Saturation

Author : Melody Jue,Rafico Ruiz
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2021-08-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478013044

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Saturation by Melody Jue,Rafico Ruiz Pdf

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other. Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska

Medium Design

Author : Keller Easterling
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781788739351

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Medium Design by Keller Easterling Pdf

Everyone is a designer. But while many practitioners may be looking for solutions or ideological certainties, Easterling argues that solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Instead, Medium Design speaks to anyone looking for alternative approaches to the world's unresponsive or intractable dilemmas-from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. Such an approach joins many disciplines in considering not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new innovations but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but put them together into productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organization of all kinds

Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds

Author : Cary Wolfe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226687971

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Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe Pdf

The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.

LEGOfied

Author : Nicholas Taylor,Chris Ingraham
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2020-02-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501354052

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LEGOfied by Nicholas Taylor,Chris Ingraham Pdf

LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media provides a multi-faceted exploration of LEGO fandom, addressing a blindspot in current accounts of LEGO and an emerging area of interest to media scholars: namely, the role of hobbyist enthusiasts and content producers in LEGO's emergence as a ubiquitous transmedia franchise. This book examines a range of LEGO hobbyism and their attendant forms of mediated self-expression and identity (their “technicities”): artists, aspiring Master Builders, collectors, and entrepreneurs who refashion LEGO bricks into new commodities (sets, tchotchkes, and minifigures). The practices and perspectives that constitute this diverse scene lie at the intersection of multiple transformations in contemporary culture, including the shifting relationships between culture industries and the audiences that form their most ardent consumer base, but also the emerging forms of entrepreneurialism, professionalization, and globalization that characterize the burgeoning DIY movement. What makes this a compelling project for media scholars is its mutli-dimensional articulation of how LEGO functions not just as a toy, cultural icon, or as transmedia franchise, but as a media platform. LEGOfied is centered around their shared experiences, qualitative observations, and semi-structured interviews at a number of LEGO hobbyist conventions. Working outwards from these conventions, each chapter engages additional modes of inquiry-media archaeology, aesthetics, posthumanist philosophy, feminist media studies, and science and technology studies-to explore the origins, permutations and implications of different aspects of the contemporary LEGO fandom scene.

The News at the Ends of the Earth

Author : Hester Blum
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478004486

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The News at the Ends of the Earth by Hester Blum Pdf

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity

Author : Laura Carlson Hasler
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Bibles
ISBN : 9780190918729

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Archival Historiography in Jewish Antiquity by Laura Carlson Hasler Pdf

"If history is narrative, than Ezra-Nehemiah is only partly history. Well over half of Ezra-Nehemiah is not a narrative but rather a patchwork of cited texts that are frequently intervening in the story. The capacity of citations in Ezra-Nehemiah to offend the historiographical, aesthetic, and theological sensibilities of scholars in the last century invites us to renew the question of what citation accomplishes in this context. In this book, I label the citation style in Ezra-Nehemiah, "archival historiography." I argue that the act of citation in Ezra-Nehemiah forms an alternative site of archiving in Ezra-Nehemiah and this hybrid literary form prioritizes the assembly and organization of documents over the production of a seamless narrative. I begin this argument by comparing this literary form with archival institutions and practices across the landscape of the ancient Near East, contending that Ezra-Nehemiah adapts the symbolic power of these ancient collections. I then identify the role of the imperial archive within the narrative of Ezra-Nehemiah, where it surfaces as an axial and ambivalent source of political power. By reviewing the cited documents in Ezra-Nehemiah, this book argues that the act of citation is not, as has been commonly argued, solely or even primarily in the business of authorizing this account or symbolizing the fulfillment of prophetic promises. Rather, citation in Ezra-Nehemiah is aimed at reestablishing a community by organizing memory into retrievable texts. Archival historiography thus constitutes an essential act of communal recovery. Creating an archive within the pages of Ezra-Nehemiah represents the cultural vitality of the Judean community after the losses of exile and while living in the long shadow of imperial rule." --

Romantic Mediations

Author : Andrew Burkett
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781438463278

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Romantic Mediations by Andrew Burkett Pdf

Investigates the ways in which new technologies and theories of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media engage with a diverse set of texts by British Romantic writers. Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism’s role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by—while simultaneously shaping considerably—new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media. “Romantic Mediations brings contemporary media theory to major Romantic texts and their reception. Few if any scholars working in Romanticism and media have taken up the generational difference between Friedrich Kittler’s media theory and the more contemporary media archaeology of Jussi Parikka. Moreover, too often have media theories of Romanticism been restricted to digital media and screen technology. Andrew Burkett creates a new path for Romantic period scholarship by showing the potential of media archaeology for Romantic texts and their long afterlife.” — Ron Broglio, author of Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750–1830

Information

Author : Michele Kennerly,Samuel Frederick,Jonathan E. Abel
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231552806

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Information by Michele Kennerly,Samuel Frederick,Jonathan E. Abel Pdf

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age”—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and critiquing the historical, cultural, and conceptual nature of information. This book is one of two companion volumes that explore theories and histories of information from a humanistic perspective. They consider information as a long-standing feature of social, cultural, and conceptual management, a matter of social practice, and a fundamental challenge for the humanities today. Bringing together essays by prominent critics, Information: Keywords highlights the humanistic nature of information practices and concepts by thinking through key terms. It describes and anticipates directions for how the humanities can contribute to our understanding of information from a range of theoretical, historical, and global perspectives. Together with Information: A Reader, it sets forth a major humanistic vision of the concept of information.

Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice

Author : Laurens Schlicht,Carla Seemann,Christian Kassung
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2020-04-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783030394196

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Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice by Laurens Schlicht,Carla Seemann,Christian Kassung Pdf

This book provides a genealogical perspective on various forms of mind reading in different settings. We understand mind reading in a broad sense as the twentieth-century attempt to generate knowledge of what people held in their minds – with a focus on scientifically-based governmental practices. This volume considers the techniques of mind reading within a wider perspective of discussions about technological innovation within neuroscience, the juridical system, “occult” practices and discourses within the wider field of parapsychology and magical beliefs. The authors address the practice of, and discourses on, mind reading as they form part of the consolidation of modern governmental techniques. The collected contributions explore the question of how these techniques have been epistemically formed, institutionalized, practiced, discussed, and how they have been used to shape forms of subjectivities – collectively through human consciousness or individually through the criminal, deviant, or spiritual subject. The first part of this book focuses on the technologies and media of mind reading, while the second part addresses practices of mind reading as they have been used within the juridical sphere. The volume is of interest to a broad scholarly readership dealing with topics in interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, history of knowledge, cultural studies, and techniques of subjectivization.

Software, Infrastructure, Labor

Author : Ned Rossiter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2016-06-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781135016371

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Software, Infrastructure, Labor by Ned Rossiter Pdf

Infrastructure makes worlds. Software coordinates labor. Logistics governs movement. These pillars of contemporary capitalism correspond with the materiality of digital communication systems on a planetary scale. Ned Rossiter theorizes the force of logistical media to discern how subjectivity and labor, economy and society are tied to the logistical imaginary of seamless interoperability. Contingency haunts logistical power. Technologies of capture are prone to infrastructural breakdown, sabotage, and failure. Strategies of evasion, anonymity, and disruption unsettle regimes of calculation and containment. We live in a computational age where media, again, disappear into the background as infrastructure. Software, Infrastructure, Labor intercuts transdisciplinary theoretical reflection with empirical encounters ranging from the Cold War legacy of cybernetics, shipping ports in China and Greece, the territoriality of data centers, video game design, and scrap metal economies in the e-waste industry. Rossiter argues that infrastructural ruins serve as resources for the collective design of blueprints and prototypes demanded of radical politics today.

Media Backends

Author : Lisa Parks,Julia Velkova,Sander de Ridder
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2023-12-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780252054877

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Media Backends by Lisa Parks,Julia Velkova,Sander de Ridder Pdf

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India. A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

Romanticism and Speculative Realism

Author : Chris Washington,Anne C. McCarthy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2019-01-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501336393

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism by Chris Washington,Anne C. McCarthy Pdf

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities

Author : Dorothy Kim,Adeline Koh
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 513 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781953035578

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Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities by Dorothy Kim,Adeline Koh Pdf

"Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities examines the process of history in the narrative of the digital humanities and deconstructs its history as a straight line from the beginnings of humanities computing. By discussing alternatives histories of the digital humanities that address queer gaming, feminist game studies praxis, Cold War military-industrial complex computation, the creation of the environmental humanities, monolingual discontent in DH, the hidden history of DH in English studies, radical media praxis, cultural studies and DH, indigenous futurities, Pacific Rim post-colonial DH, the issue of scale and DH, the radical, indigenous, feminist histories of the digital database, and the possibilities for an antifascist DH, this collection hopes to re-set discussions of the DH straight, white origin myths. Thus, this collection hopes to reexamine the silences in such a straight and white masculinist history and how power comes into play to shape this straight, white DH narrative."--Page 4 of cover

Nonhuman Photography

Author : Joanna Zylinska
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2017-11-03
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9780262037020

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Nonhuman Photography by Joanna Zylinska Pdf

A new philosophy of photography that goes beyond humanist concepts to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent, as both subject and agent. Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans, whether artists or amateurs, entail a nonhuman, mechanical element—that is, they involve the execution of technical and cultural algorithms that shape our image-making devices as well as our viewing practices. At the same time, she notes, photography is increasingly mobilized to document the precariousness of the human habitat and tasked with helping us imagine a better tomorrow. With its conjoined human-nonhuman agency and vision, Zylinska claims, photography functions as both a form of control and a life-shaping force. Zylinska explores the potential of photography for developing new modes of seeing and imagining, and presents images from her own photographic project, Active Perceptual Systems. She also examines the challenges posed by digitization to established notions of art, culture, and the media. In connecting biological extinction and technical obsolescence, and discussing the parallels between photography and fossilization, she proposes to understand photography as a light-induced process of fossilization across media and across time scales.