Download or read book Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity written by S. Short and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-11-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book breaks new ground in providing an in-depth critical assessment of cyborg cinema, arguing that it remains one of the most intriguing and provocative cycles to have emerged in contemporary screen culture. Tracing the cinematic cyborg's transition over the last two decades and evaluating the theoretical significance attributed to this figure, it asks what relevance the cyborg continues to have in terms of understanding human identity, our relationship to technology, and to one another.
Download or read book Queer Tracks Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music written by Doris Leibetseder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This exciting cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Based on a constructivist concept of gender, Leibetseder asks: ’Which queer-feminist strategies are used in rock and pop music?’ ’How do they function?’ ’Where do they occur?’ Leibetseder's methodological process is to discover subversive strategies in queer theory, which are also used in rock and pop music, without assuming that these tactics were first invented in theory. Furthermore, this book explains where exactly the subversiveness is situated in those strategies and in popular music. With the help of a new kind of knowledge transfer the author combines sociological and cultural theories with practical examples of rock and pop music. The subversive character of these queer motifs is shown in the work of contemporary popular musicians and is at the same time related to classical discourses of the humanities. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks. Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.
Download or read book Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction written by Sherryl Vint and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-04 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women’s bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.
Download or read book Film Consciousness written by Spencer Shaw and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of film consciousness is one that has played around various film and philosophical discourses without ever really surfacing as a cogent theory. Representing the first major expression of film consciousness as a tangible concept, this critical study revisits notions of memory, retentional consciousness, narrative expectation, and spatio-temporal perception while also analyzing several major films. The first half of the book focuses on understanding the elements of the film experience--and its associated consciousness--through the descriptive tools of phenomenology. The second part develops the idea of film consciousness as a unique vision of the world and as a large element in the human understanding of reality. Throughout the work, the author combines the ideas of philosophers and film theorists from phenomenology--such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bazin, and Kracauer--with the postmodernist work of Deleuze and transitional theorists Bergson and Benjamin.
Download or read book Anime and Philosophy written by Josef Steiff and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anime and Philosophy focuses on some of the most-loved, most-intriguing anime films and series, as well as lesser-known works, to find what lies at their core. Astro Boy, Dragon Ball Z, Ghost in the Shell, and Spirited Away are just a few of the films analyzed in this book. In these stories about monsters, robots, children, and spirits who grapple with the important questions in life we find insight crucial to our times: lessons on morality, justice, and heroism, as well as meditations on identity, the soul, and the meaning -- or meaninglessness -- of life. Anime has become a worldwide phenomenon, reaching across genres, mediums, and cultures. For those wondering why so many people love anime or for die-hard fans who want to know more, Anime and Philosophy provides a deeper appreciation of the art and storytelling of this distinctive Japanese culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas written by J. P. Telotte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For the contemporary film audience, science fiction has become a key locus for displaying-and imaginatively addressing-its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of sub-genre labels that mark off a substantially "new" group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or "read" them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary "slants" and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or "read" them differently. In the process, it also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture's own constant changes"--
Download or read book Anime Aesthetics written by Alistair D. Swale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese animation has been given fulsome academic commentary in recent years. However, there is arguably a need for a more philosophically consistent and theoretically integrated engagement. While this book covers the key thinkers of contemporary aesthetic theory, it aims to reground reflection on anime within the aesthetics of R.G. Collingwood.
Download or read book Deleuze and Baudrillard written by McQueen Sean McQueen and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sean McQueen rewrites and re-envisions Gilles Deleuze's and Jean Baudrillard's relationship with Marxism and with each other, from their breakdowns to their breakthroughs. He theorises shifts in and across critical approaches to capitalism, science, technology, psychoanalysis, literature and cinema and media studies. He also brings renewed Marxian readings to cyberpunk texts previously theorised by Deleuze and Baudrillard, and places them at the heart of the emergence of biopunk and its relation to biocapitalism by mapping their generic, technoscientific, libidinal and economic exchanges.
Download or read book Frontiers of Cyberspace written by and published by Brill. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The content of this volume reflects theoretical and practical discussions on cultural issues influenced by increased adoption of information and communication technologies. The penetration of new forms of communication, such as online social networking, internet video-casting, and massive online multiplayer gaming; the experience and exploration of virtual worlds; and the massive adoption of ever-emergent ICT technologies; are all developments in desperate need of serious examination. It is not surprising that these new realities, and the questions and issues to which they give rise, have drawn increasing attention from academics. Those engaging these issues do so from a wide range of academic fields. Accordingly, the authors contributing to this volume represent an impressive array of academic disciplines and varied perspectives, including philosophy, sociology, religion, anthropology, digital humanities, literature studies, film science, new media studies and still others. Thus, the subsequent chapters offer the reader a multidimensional examination of this volume’s unifying theme: the ways and extent to which current and anticipated cybernetic environments have altered, and will continue to shape, our understandings of what it means to be human.
Download or read book A Tale Told by a Machine written by Heather Duerre Humann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligent machines have long existed in science fiction, and they now appear in mainstream films such as Bladerunner, Ex Machina, I Am Mother and Her, as well as in a recent proliferation of literary texts narrated from the machine's perspective. These new portrayals of artificial intelligence inevitably foreground dilemmas related to identity and selfhood, concepts being reassessed in the 21st century. Taking a close look at novels like Ancillary Justice, Aurora, All Systems Red, The Actuality, The Unseen World and Klara and the Sun, this work investigates key questions that arise from the use of AI narrators. It describes how these narratives challenge humanist principles by suggesting that selfhood is an illusion, even as they make the case for extending these principles to machines by proposing that they are not so different from humans. The book examines what is at stake with nonhuman narration, the qualities of AI narratives, and what it might mean to relate to a narrator when the voice adopted is that of an AI.
Download or read book Environmental Literacy and New Digital Audiences written by Pat Brereton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental literacy and education is not simply a top-down process of disseminating correct attitudes, values and beliefs. Rather, it is one that incorporates and facilitates a dialogue with audiences of different persuasions and at all levels of engagement, to help highlight and co-produce consensual solutions to the major eco-challenges of our time. Exploring the growing power and influence of media formats and outlets like YouTube and gaming, alongside fictional and documentary film, this book considers new modes of environmental literacy to ascertain the effectiveness of digital and filmic stimuli on an audience’s perception of environmental issues, and its specific impact on environmental action. Drawing on extensive research across a broad range of media formats, Brereton establishes how environmental narratives and meanings are created and being received by contemporary audiences. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication and media, eco-criticism and environmental humanities more broadly.
Download or read book Posthuman Management written by Matthew E. Gladden and published by Defragmenter Media. This book was released on 2016-08-07 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the best practices for leading a workforce in which human employees have merged cognitively and physically with electronic information systems and work alongside social robots, artificial life-forms, and self-aware networks that are ‘colleagues’ rather than simply ‘tools’? How does one manage organizational structures and activities that span actual and virtual worlds? How are the forces of technological posthumanization transforming the theory and practice of management? This volume explores the reality that an organization’s workers, managers, customers, and other stakeholders increasingly comprise a complex network of human agents, artificial agents, and hybrid human-synthetic entities. The first part of the book develops the theoretical foundations of an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ and presents frameworks for understanding and managing the evolving workplace relationship between human and synthetic beings. Other chapters investigate topics such as the likelihood that social robots might utilize charismatic authority to lead human workers; potential roles of AIs as managers of cross-cultural virtual teams; the ethics and legality of entrusting organizational decision-making to spatially diffuse robots that have no discernible physical form; quantitative approaches to comparing managerial capabilities of human and artificial agents; the creation of artificial life-forms that function as autonomous enterprises competing against human businesses; neural implants as gateways that allow human users to participate in new forms of organizational life; and the implications of advanced neuroprosthetics for information security and business model design. As the first comprehensive application of posthumanist methodologies to management, this volume will interest management scholars and management practitioners who must understand and guide the forces of technologization that are rapidly reshaping organizations’ form, dynamics, and societal roles.
Download or read book Cross Cultural Influences between Japanese and American Pop Cultures written by Kendra N. Sheehan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection features examinations of popular culture, including manga, music, film, cosplay, and literature, among other topics. Using interdisciplinary sources and analyses, this collection adds to the global discussion and relevancy of Japanese popular culture. This collection serves to highlight the work of multidisciplinary scholars who offer fresh perspectives of ongoing cross-cultural and cyclical influences that are commonly found between the US and Japan. Notably, this collection considers the relationships that have influenced Japanese popular culture, and how this has, in turn, influenced the Western world.
Download or read book The Orientation of Future Cinema written by Bruce Isaacs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the fate of cinema in an age of new technologies, new aesthetic styles, new modes of cultural production and consumption? What becomes of cinema and a century-long history of the moving image when the theatre is outmoded as a social and aesthetic space, as celluloid gives over to digital technology, as the art-house and multiplex are overtaken by a proliferation of home entertainment systems? The Orientation of Future Cinema offers an ambitious and compelling argument for the continued life of cinema as image, narrative and experience. Commencing with Lumière's Arrival of a Train at a Station, Bruce Isaacs confronts the threat of contemporary digital technologies and processes by returning to cinema's complex history as a technological and industrial phenomenon. The technology of moving images has profoundly changed; and yet cinema materialises ever more forcefully in digital capture and augmentation, 3-D perception and affect, High Frame Rate cinema, and the evolution of spectacle as the dominant aesthetic mode in contemporary studio production.
Download or read book Gothic Afterlives written by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gothic Afterlives examines the intersecting dimensions of contemporary Gothic horror and remakes scholarship, bringing together innovative perspectives from different areas of study. The research compiled in this collection covers a wide range of examples, including not only literature but also film, television, video games, and digital media remakes. Gothic Afterlives signals the cultural and conceptual impact of Gothic horror on transmedia production, with a focus on reimagining and remaking. While diverse in content and approach, all chapters pivot on two important points: first, they reflect some of the core preoccupations of Gothic horror by subverting cultural and social certainties about notions such as the body, technology, consumption, human nature, digitalization, scientific experimentation, national identity, memory, and gender and by challenging the boundaries between human and inhuman, self and Other, and good and evil. Second, and perhaps most important, all chapters in the collection collectively show what happens when well-known Gothic horror narratives are adapted and remade into different contexts, highlighting the implications of the mode-shifting registers, platforms, and chronologies in the process. As a collection, Gothic Afterlives hones in on contemporary sociocultural experiences and identities as they appear in contemporary popular culture and in the stories told and retold in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Cyborg Subject written by Garfield Benjamin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-25 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines a new conception of the cyborg in terms of consciousness as the parallax gap between physical and digital worlds. The contemporary subject constructs its own internal reality in the interplay of the Virtual and the Real. Reinterpreting the work of Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze in terms of the psychological and ontological construction of the digital, alongside the philosophy of quantum physics, this book offers a challenge to materialist perspectives in the fluid cyberspace that is ever permeating our lives. The inclusion of the subject in its own epistemological framework establishes a model for an engaged spectatorship of reality. Through the analysis of online media, digital art, avatars, computer games and science fiction, a new model of cyborg culture reveals the opportunities for critical and creative interventions in the contemporary subjective experience, promoting an awareness of the parallax position we all occupy between physical and digital worlds.
Download or read book Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema written by Marianne Kac-Vergne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If science fiction stages the battle between humans and non-humans, whether alien or machine, who is elected to fight for us? In the classics of science fiction cinema, humanity is nearly always represented by a male, and until recently, a white male. Spanning landmark American films from Blade Runner to Avatar, this major new study offers the first ever analysis of masculinity in science fiction cinema. It uncovers the evolution of masculine heroes from the 1980s until the present day, and the roles played by their feminine counterparts. Considering gender alongside racial and class politics, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema also situates filmic examples within the broader culture. It is indispensable for understanding science fiction and its role in contemporary cultural politics.
