Download or read book Virtual Menageries written by Jody Berland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Download or read book The Internet Is for Cats written by Jessica Maddox and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LOLCats. Grumpy cat. Dog rating Twitter. Pet Instagram accounts. It's generally understood the internet is for pictures of cute cats (and dogs, and otters, and pandas), but how did this come to be, and how are images of pets and animals unique online social practices? In this important and engaging book, The Internet is for Cats, Jessica Maddox provides a social framework for thinking about an outrageously popular cultural phenomenon: pets and animals online. She examines how these images help make digital spaces lighthearted and fun, as well as how these images function as relieving distractions from other aspects of life. However, we cannot speak of relief or distractions without also discussing what we need relief and distractions from. Combining insights from cultural studies and Internet studies, as well as interviews, textual work, and observation, Maddox offers an entirely new approach to pets and animals on the Internet, arguing the Internet may be for cats, but the cats are also for social practices.
Download or read book Bits and Pieces written by Sarah O'Brien and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death gathers pivotal and more mundane moments, dispersed across a predominantly Western history of moving images, in which animals materialize in movies and TV shows, from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to quandaries over hunting trophies in recent home-renovation reality TV series, to animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully views these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. She explores the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens, and, more importantly, to understanding these images as more and less connected to the “production for consumption” of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers’ regard for animals.
Download or read book Transformative Arts written by Gary A. Berg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-03-02 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish stages. Art thusly conceived is something that most people never practice in their lives. Yet in day-to-day life we all experience creative satisfaction through interaction with the physical and social environment that is a form of artistic practice. In Transformative Arts: Biological, Digital, and Everyday Aesthetics, Gary A. Berg explores what we gain through understanding ways to live imaginative lives and considers the increasingly important collaborative role of computers and interaction with nature.
Download or read book Animals Plants and Afterimages written by Valérie Bienvenue and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.
Download or read book Boundaries of Self and Reality Online written by Jayne Gackenbach and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As technology continues to rapidly advance, individuals and society are profoundly changed. So too are the tools used to measure this universe and, therefore, our understanding of reality improves. Boundaries of Self and Reality Online examines the idea that technological advances associated with the Internet are moving us in multiple domains toward various "edges." These edges range from self, to society, to relationships, and even to the very nature of reality. Boundaries are dissolving and we are redefining the elements of identity. The book begins with explorations of the digitally constructed self and the relationship between the individual and technological reality. Then, the focus shifts to society at large and includes a contribution from Chinese researchers about the isolated Chinese Internet. The later chapters of the book explore digital reality at large, including discussions on virtual reality, Web consciousness, and digital physics. Cyberpsychology architecture Video games as a tool for self-understanding Avatars and the meaning behind them Game transfer phenomena A Jungian perspective on technology Politics of social media The history and science of video game play Transcendent virtual reality experiences The theophoric quality of video games
Download or read book Zooicide written by Sue Coe and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of zoos is not about treatment, but use; not about reform, but abolition. Zoos often pay lip-service to “education,” “enrichment,” and “conservation,” but the cruelty is systemic and follows from the idea of animals as commodities. As long as they are property, animals will continue to be treated as things, with no rights, who can be caged, bred, abused, or killed for a zoo’s profit and the public’s entertainment. In Zooicide, Sue Coe applies her bold and breathtaking artistic style to confront the institution of zoos, exposing them as a form of capitalist cruelty that is enmeshed with the violence of war, colonialism, and ecological destruction.
Download or read book Capacious written by Gregory J. Seigworth and published by Capacious Journal. This book was released on 2021-10-04 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal. The principal aim of Capacious is to ‘make room’ for a wide diversity of approaches and emerging voices to engage with ongoing conversations in and around affect studies. Capacious endeavours to promote diverse bloom-spaces for affect’s study over the dulling hum of any specific orthodoxy. Dedication (for Lauren Berlant) by Ann Cvetkovich. Introduction by E Cram and afterword by Kay Gordon and Neekse Alexander. Essays by Kathryn J. Strom, Freya Johnson, Alice Butler, Shanee Barraclough, and Randal Rogers. Interstices (short visual and textual interventions) by Eric Jenkins, Joey Orr, Margaryta Golovchenko, Mack Hagood & Marie Thompson (introduced by Jonathan Sterne), Jason Read, and Randall Johnson. Book reviews by Max Johnson Dugan, Sean Grattan, Megan Schoettler, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, and James Arnett.
Download or read book Marx for Cats written by Leigh Claire La Berge and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.
Download or read book Young People and Social Media Contemporary Children s Digital Culture written by Steve Gennaro and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children’s Digital Culture’ explores the practices, relationships, consequences, benefits, and outcomes of children’s experiences with, on, and through social media by bringing together a vast array of different ideas about childhood, youth, and young people’s lives. These ideas are drawn from scholars working in a variety of disciplines, and rather than just describing the social construction of childhood or an understanding of children’s lives, this collection seeks to encapsulate not only how young people exist on social media but also how their physical lives are impacted by their presence on social media. One of the aims of this volume in exploring youth interaction with social media is to unpack the structuring of digital technologies in terms of how young people access the technology to use it as a means of communication, a platform for identification, and a tool for participation in their larger social world. During longstanding and continued experience in the broad field of youth and digital culture, we have come to realize that not only is the subject matter increasing in importance at an immeasurable rate, but the amount of textbooks and/or edited collections has lagged behind considerably. There is a lack of sources that fully encapsulate the canon of texts for the discipline or the rich diversity and complexity of overlapping subject areas that create the fertile ground for studying young people’s lives and culture. The editors hope that this text will occupy some of that void and act as a catalyst for future interdisciplinary collections. ‘Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children’s Digital Culture’ will appeal to undergraduate students studying Child and Youth Studies and—given the interdisciplinary nature of the collection— scholars, researchers and students at all levels working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, communication studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and human rights, among others. Practitioners in these fields will also find this collection of particular interest.
Download or read book A Research Agenda for Digital Geographies written by Tess Osborne and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade, digital geographies has emerged as a dynamic area of scholarly enquiry, critically examining how the digital has reshaped the geography of our world. Bringing together authors working at the cutting-edge of the field, and grounding abstract ideas in case studies, this Research Agenda looks at the ways in which technology has altered all aspects of society, culture and the environment.
Download or read book Beyond Straw Men written by Phaedra C. Pezzullo and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Strawmen moves beyond "hot take" or strawman fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing, Pezzullo engages public controversies, policies, and headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the US, and Vietnam through hashtag activism, campaign materials, and her podcast, Communicating Care. She argues that plastics have become an entry point into contested environmental politics, including carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Strawmen shares how unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex are resisted through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care"--
Download or read book Re Understanding Media written by Sarah Sharma and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-23 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan’s theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan’s discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes. Contributors. Nasma Ahmed, Morehshin Allahyari, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brooke Erin Duffy, Ganaele Langlois, Sara Martel, Shannon Mattern, Cait McKinney, Jeremy Packer, Craig Robertson, Sarah Sharma, Ladan Siad, Rianka Singh, Nicholas Taylor, Armond R. Towns, and Jennifer Wemigwans
Download or read book Computational Formalism written by Amanda Wasielewski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the use of machine learning to analyze art images has revived formalism in art history, presenting a golden opportunity for art historians and computer scientists to learn from one another. Though formalism is an essential tool for art historians, much recent art history has focused on the social and political aspects of art. But now art historians are adopting machine learning methods to develop new ways to analyze the purely visual in datasets of art images. Amanda Wasielewski uses the term “computational formalism” to describe this use of machine learning and computer vision technique in art historical research. At the same time that art historians are analyzing art images in new ways, computer scientists are using art images for experiments in machine learning and computer vision. Their research, says Wasielewski, would be greatly enriched by the inclusion of humanistic issues. The main purpose in applying computational techniques such as machine learning to art datasets is to automate the process of categorization using metrics such as style, a historically fraught concept in art history. After examining a fifteen-year trajectory in image categorization and art dataset creation in the fields of machine learning and computer vision, Wasielewski considers deep learning techniques that both create and detect forgeries and fakes in art. She investigates examples of art historical analysis in the fields of computer and information sciences, placing this research in the context of art historiography. She also raises questions as which artworks are chosen for digitization, and of those artworks that are born digital, which works gain acceptance into the canon of high art.
Download or read book The Celluloid Specimen written by Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles—have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa's incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history—and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.
Download or read book Northern Sparks written by Michael Century and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “episode of light” in Canada sparked by Expo 67 when new art forms, innovative technologies, and novel institutional and policy frameworks emerged together. Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Michael Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67. Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. Century offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren’s “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre. Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis.
Download or read book On Black Media Philosophy written by Armond R. Towns and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown’s killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.
