Download or read book Flatline Constructs written by Mark Fisher and published by . This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donna Haraway's celebrated observation that "our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert" has given this issue a certain currency in contemporary cyber-theory. But what is in- teresting about Haraway's remark - its challenge to the oppositional think- ing that sets up free will against determinism, vitalism against mechanism - has seldom been processed by a mode of theorizing which has tended to reproduce exactly the same oppositions. These theoretical failings, it will be argued here, arise from a resistance to pursuing cybernetics to its limits (a failure evinced as much by cyberneticists as by cultural theorists, it must be added). Unraveling the implications of cybernetics, it will be claimed, takes us out to the Gothic flatline. The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorize this flatline demands a new approach, one committed to the theorization of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism.
Download or read book Algorithmic Desire written by Matthew Flisfeder and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Algorithmic Desire, Matthew Flisfeder shows that social media is a metaphor that reveals the dominant form of contemporary ideology: neoliberal capitalism. The preeminent medium of our time, social media’s digital platform and algorithmic logic shape our experience of democracy, enjoyment, and desire. Weaving between critical theory and analyses of popular culture, Flisfeder uses examples from The King’s Speech, Black Mirror, Gone Girl, The Circle, and Arrival to argue that social media highlights the antisocial dimensions of twenty‐first-century capitalism. He counters leading critical theories of social media—such as new materialism and accelerationism—and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, proposing instead a new structuralist account of the ideology and metaphor of social media. Emphasizing the structural role of crises, gaps, and negativity as central to our experiences of reality, Flisfeder interprets the social media metaphor through a combination of dialectical, Marxist, and Lacanian frameworks to show that algorithms may indeed read our desire, but capitalism, not social media, truly makes us antisocial. Wholly original in its interdisciplinary approach to social media and ideology, Flisfeder’s conception of “algorithmic desire” is timely, intriguing, and sure to inspire debate.
Download or read book Panegyric written by Guy Debord and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2009-06-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guy Debord’s silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography mixes precision and pastiche in a whirlwind account of philosophy, exploit, and inebriation. From the stark professions of Volume I to the illustrated sequences of Volume 2, Panegyric confronts us with a figure who strategically, demonically tried to wrest life from the disabling modern ‘spectacle.’
Download or read book Terminal Identity written by Scott Bukatman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity--referring to both the site of the termination of the conventional "subject" and the birth of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer terminal or television screen--puts to rest any lingering doubts of the significance of science fiction in contemporary cultural studies. Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, Bukatman redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theories of the postmodern--including Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard--Bukatman begins with the proposition that Western culture is suffering a crisis brought on by advanced electronic technologies. Then in a series of chapters richly supported by analyses of literary texts, visual arts, film, video, television, comics, computer games, and graphics, Bukatman takes the reader on an odyssey that traces the postmodern subject from its current crisis, through its close encounters with technology, and finally to new self-recognition. This new "virtual subject," as Bukatman defines it, situates the human and the technological as coexistent, codependent, and mutally defining. Synthesizing the most provocative theories of postmodern culture with a truly encyclopedic treatment of the relevant media, this volume sets a new standard in the study of science fiction--a category that itself may be redefined in light of this work. Bukatman not only offers the most detailed map to date of the intellectual terrain of postmodern technology studies--he arrives at new frontiers, providing a propitious launching point for further inquiries into the relationship of electronic technology and culture.
Download or read book MediaArtHistories written by Oliver Grau and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history. Contributors Rudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel
Download or read book Applied Ballardianism written by Simon Sellars and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm. The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future… Fleeing the excesses of 1990s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality. Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space. An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Egress written by Matt Colquhoun and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point—a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fiction—Egress consider the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher’s own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.
Download or read book The Clouds written by Stefano Gualeni and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a slow autumn afternoon, an atmospheric physicist working at the Malta Weather Station receives a surprising email from a colleague working in the United Kingdom: something troubling has apparently been detected during one of their research flights. The ensuing meteorological mystery is the starting point for the science fiction novella The Clouds. Alongside the novella, this book features three essays written by the same author that discuss in a more explicit and conventional way three philosophical ideas showcased in The Clouds: the expressive use of fictional games within fictional worlds; the possibility for existential meaning within simulated universes; and the unnatural narratological trope of "unhappening." With its unique format, this book is a fresh reflection on the mediatic form of philosophy and a compelling argument for the philosophical value of fiction.
Download or read book Novels by Aliens written by Kate Marshall and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Twenty-first century fiction and literary study have taken a decidedly weird turn: they show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall's Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: The Old Weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century's cowboys and aliens; Cosmic Realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and Pseudoscience Fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Marshall's book offers sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kazuo Ishiguro, Willa Cather to Maggie Nelson"--
Download or read book Boring Formless Nonsense written by Eldritch Priest and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.
Download or read book K punk written by Mark Fisher and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive collection of the writings of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), whose work defined critical writing for a generation. This comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds.
Download or read book Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture written by Anna McFarlane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures in cyberpunk culture, this outstanding guide charts the rich and varied landscape of cyberpunk from the 1970s to present day. The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk. This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.
Download or read book Shared Fantasy written by Gary Alan Fine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-08-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic study still provides one of the most acute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players—as well as their reasons for playing.
Download or read book Chronosis written by Reza Negarestani and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought. Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another. Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility. A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought. This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.
Download or read book Noncommutative Geometry written by Alain Connes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-12-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noncommutative Geometry is one of the most deep and vital research subjects of present-day Mathematics. Its development, mainly due to Alain Connes, is providing an increasing number of applications and deeper insights for instance in Foliations, K-Theory, Index Theory, Number Theory but also in Quantum Physics of elementary particles. The purpose of the Summer School in Martina Franca was to offer a fresh invitation to the subject and closely related topics; the contributions in this volume include the four main lectures, cover advanced developments and are delivered by prominent specialists.
Download or read book Revolutionary Demonology written by Gruppo di Nun and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music. The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love. Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.
