Caleb Kelly: Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · experimental music, glitch, music, music history, noise, sound recording
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage’s silences and indeterminacies, to Paik’s often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262013142, 9780262013147
392 pages
Download (removed on 2013-12-5 upon request of the author)
See Caleb Kelly’s Cracked and Broken Media in 20th and 21st Century Music and Sound, 2006 (added on 2014-2-19)
Terry Harpold: Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · fiction, hypertext, literature, reading, screen, technology, text, theory
“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field.
In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading.
In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816651027, 9780816651023
368 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-1-23)
Comment (0)Karol Jakubowicz, Miklós Sükösd (eds.): Finding the Right Place on the Map: Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · democracy, east-central europe, journalism, mass media, media, public broadcasting
Finding the Right Place on the Map is a crosscutting, international comparison of the media systems and the democratic performance of the media in post-Communist countries. It explores issues of commercial media, social exclusion, and consumer capitalism in a comparative East-West perspective.
Each chapter considers a different aspect of the trends and problems surrounding the media in comparative European and global perspectives. The result is a creative collaboration of leading authors from East and West that covers a rich array of controversial subjects in a comprehensive manner. Topics range from the civil society approach to media and public service broadcasting to journalism cultures, fandom, representation of poverty and gender that reinforces social exclusion and legitimizes consumer capitalism.
Finding the Right Place on the Map is a unique, up-to-date overview of what media transformation has meant for post-communist countries in nearly two decades.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2008
ISBN 184150193X, 9781841501932
301 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)
Comments (2)