An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art.
Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new ...phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype.
Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art.
His analysis draws on the work of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future.
Media and communication have become ubiquitous in today’s societies and affect all aspects of life. On an individual level, they impact how we learn about the world, how we entertain ourselves, and ...how we interact with others. On an organisational level, the interactions between media and organisations, such as political parties, NGOs, businesses and brands, shape organisations’ reputation, legitimacy, trust and (financial) performance, as well as individuals’ consumer, political, social and health behaviours. At the societal level, media and communication are crucial for shaping public opinion on current issues such as climate change, sustainability, diversity, and well-being. Media challenges are widespread and include mis- and disinformation, the negative impact of algorithms on our information diets, challenges to our privacy, cyberbullying, media addiction, and unwanted persuasion, among many others. All this makes the study of media and communication crucial. This book provides a broad overview of the ways in which people create, use, and experience their media environment, and the role of media and communication for individuals, organisations, and society. The chapters in the book were written by researchers from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. ASCoR is today the largest research institute of its kind in Europe and has developed over the past 25 years into one of the best communications research institutes in the world.
Stephanie Dinkins is renowned for her critical investigations into artificial intelligence and machine learning systems as they intersect race, gender, and our future histories. By using her training ...in documentary practices as a photo-based artist, she creates inclusive platforms for dialogue and action toward building technological ecosystems and datasets that are equitable, accessible, and transparent. Her immersive installations, community-based workshops, and public talks seek audience participation and engagement in a way that pushes the boundaries of new media and socially engaged art practices in the 21st century. Stephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data brings together nationally renowned curators and theorists who draw from methodologies of art criticism, social practice, new media theory, and critical studies to offer an in-depth analysis of key installations in Dinkins’s survey exhibition. The book also includes an important essay by Stephanie Dinkins on her concept of Afro-now-ism in which she expands on her theoretical framework and positionality as a Black new media artist in the 21st century. Dinkins’s artistic research transcends the boundaries of visual art to challenge and expose the bias and inequities of caste, race, and gender, which are encoded within digital systems on which governance, healthcare, and security infrastructures in the United States are based.
Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting ...dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks , Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the "network anaesthesia" that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience -- what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices -- from artists who "undermine" data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments -- are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.
Understanding Digital Literacies Second Edition provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. This book equips students with the theoretical and analytical tools with which ...to explore the linguistic dimensions and social impact of a range of digital literacy practices. Each chapter in the volume covers a different topic, presenting an overview of the major concepts, issues, problems, and debates surrounding it, while also encouraging students to reflect on and critically evaluate their own language and communication practices.
Features of the second edition include:
Expanded coverage of a diverse range of digital media practices that now includes Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, and WhatsApp;
Two entirely new chapters on mobility and materiality, and surveillance and privacy;
Updated activities in each chapter which engage students in reflecting on and analysing their own media use;
E-resources featuring a glossary of key terms and supplementary material for each chapter, including additional activities and links to useful websites, articles, and videos.
This book is an essential textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses in new media and digital literacies.
A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical ...architecture.
What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?
In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us.
In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
thestack.org
This collection of essays center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition - patterns of ...development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures.;The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window". The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.
A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media.
With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new ...philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.
Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.
Relationscapes takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
