Goran D. Putnik, Maria Manuela Cunha (eds.): Encyclopedia of Networked and Virtual Organizations (2008)

The virtual enterprise as a new organizational paradigm has three fundamental features: dynamics of network reconfiguration, virtuality, and external entities as environments for enabling or supporting the virtual enterprise integration as well as reconfiguration dynamics. The field of knowledge on this topic is highly fragmented due to the inexistence of a transfer of knowledge between regions, developers, and researchers.

The Encyclopedia of Networked & Virtual Organizations documents the most relevant contributions to the introduction of networked, dynamic, agile, and virtual organizational models; definitions; taxonomies; opportunities; and reference models and architectures. These volumes pool the existing works, approaches, solutions, and needs of the virtual enterprise research community to create a repository of the main developments regarding the virtual organization, compiling definitions, characteristics, comparisons, advantages, practices, enabling technologies, and best practices.

Publisher: Information Science Reference
ISBN: 159904885X, 978-1599048857
2060 pages

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Alexander R. Galloway: Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006)

“Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices.

In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions.

Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form.

Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2006
ISBN 0816648514, 9780816648511
143 pages

Review (Kelly Boudreau), Review (Steven Conway), Review (Ted Kafala), Review (Randy Nichols), Review (Timothy Welsh)

PDF (updated on 2012-7-8)

Oliver Grau: Virtual Art: From Illusion To Immersion (2001–)

“Although many people view virtual reality as a 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.”

This book is a translation of a revised and expanded version of a book entitled Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Visuelle Strategien, Berlin: Reimer, 2001.

Translated by Gloria Custance
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
Leonardo Books series
ISBN 0262572230, 9780262572231
430 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-10-13)