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Theorizing Stupid Media
This book explores the stupid as it manifests in media—the cinema, television and streamed content, and videogames. The stupid is theorized not as a pejorative term but to address media that “fails” to conform to established narrative conventions, often surfacing at evolutionary moments. The Transformers franchise is often dismissed as being stupid because its stylistic vernacular privileges kinetic qualities over conventional narration. Similarly, the stupid is often present in genre fails like mother!, or in instances of narrative dissonance—joyously in Adventure Time; more controversially in Gone Home— where a story “feels off” It also manifests in “ludonarrative dissonance” when gameplay and narrative seemingly run counter to one another in videogames like Undertale and Bioshock. This book is addressed to those interested in media that is quirky, spectacle-driven, or generally hard to place—stupid!
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction presents a striking new approach to how traditional art mediums—painting, sculpture, and drawing—changed in the twentieth century in response to photography, film, and other technologies. Countering the modernist view that the medium provides advanced art with “resistance” against technological pressures, Tamara Trodd argues that we should view art and its practices as imaginatively responding to the potential that artists glimpsed in mechanical reproduction, putting art into dialogue with the commercial cultures of its time. The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades—and allows us to think about these artists anew.
My Possessive Vampires
"Sonja is a down on her luck waitress. Her bills keep climbing and she's stuck in an embarrassing job with no way to escape. She gets a letter from one Jasper Bright. He demands she come to see him that very night. There's only one problem, Sonja has no idea who he is. Her boss has been acting very strange lately. Ever since she received that letter he's been almost possessive, but that couldn't possibly be true, right? But these men are holding a secret of their own and when Sonja stumbles onto it, her normal everyday troubles are over and she's got a whole slew of much more worrisome ones to deal with. Just what are you supposed to do when you find yourself in the center of two possessive vampires?"
Advances in Physarum Machines
This book is devoted to Slime mould Physarum polycephalum, which is a large single cell capable for distributed sensing, concurrent information processing, parallel computation and decentralized actuation. The ease of culturing and experimenting with Physarum makes this slime mould an ideal substrate for real-world implementations of unconventional sensing and computing devices The book is a treatise of theoretical and experimental laboratory studies on sensing and computing properties of slime mould, and on the development of mathematical and logical theories of Physarum behavior. It is shown how to make logical gates and circuits, electronic devices (memristors, diodes, transistors, wires,...
Counting the Miracles: Jewish Thought, Mysticism, and the Arts from Late Antiquity to the Present
In honor of the writings of Giulio Busi, scholar of Jewish culture, the book investigates from a multidisciplinary perspective the extraordinary richness of Jewish culture in the Diaspora from antiquity to the latter part of the 20th century. A number of rabbinic writings, medieval manuscripts from the South of France, visual qabbalah, the Yiddish language, artistic expressions as well as the philosophical and social traditions of some prominent twentieth-century figures will be explored. While the Jewish cultural tradition has always incorporated the cultural influences of the broader socio-historical context in which it was embedded, it has in turn been a source of inspiration for the inte...
Japanese Visual Culture
Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological,...
