Peter Lunenfeld (ed.): The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · collage, cyberspace, digital cinema, hypertext, image, interactivity, internet, pornography, screen, technology, virtual reality
The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.
Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
320 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)
Comments (2)Nicholas Gane, David Beer: New Media: The Key Concepts (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · archive, interactivity, interface, media theory, networks, new media, simulation
Digital media are rapidly changing the world in which we live. Global communications, mobile interfaces and Internet cultures are re-configuring our everyday lives and experiences.
To understand these changes, a new theoretical imagination is needed, one that is informed by a conceptual vocabulary that is able to cope with the daunting complexity of the world today. This book draws on writings by leading social and cultural theorists to assemble this vocabulary.
It addresses six key concepts that are pivotal for understanding the impact of new media on contemporary society and culture: information, network, interface, interactivity, archive and simulation. Each concept is considered through a range of concrete examples to illustrate how they might be developed and used as research tools. An inter-disciplinary approach is taken that spans a number of fields, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies and computer science.
Publisher Berg, 2008
ISBN 1845201337, 9781845201333
149 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-9-3)
Comment (0)Ron Burnett: How Images Think (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · augmented reality, computer games, electronic art, interactivity, p2p, technology, telepresence, virtual reality
Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are “thinking”; ascribing thought to machines redefines our relationship with them and enlarges our ideas about body and mind. Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines.
After presenting an overview of visual perception, Burnett examines the interactive modes of new technologies—including computer games, virtual reality, digital photography, and film— and locates digital images in a historical context. He argues that virtual images occupy a “middle space,” combining the virtual and the real into an environment of visualization that blurs the distinctions between subject and object—part of a continuum of experiences generated by creative choices by viewers, the results of which cannot be attributed either to images or to participants.
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262524414, 9780262524414
Length 253 pages
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)