Michel Chion: Film, a Sound Art (2003/2009)

“French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise—it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema.

The first half of Film, A Sound Art considers developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. The second half explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. With restless inventiveness, Chion develops a rhetoric that describes the effects of audio-visual combinations, forcing us to rethink sound film. He claims, for example, that the silent era (which he terms “deaf cinema”) did not end with the advent of sound technology but continues to function underneath and within later films. Expanding our appreciation of cinematic experiences ranging from Dolby multitrack in action films and the eerie tricycle of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, A Sound Art showcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.”

First published as Art sonore, le cinema, 2003

Translated by Claudia Gorbman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2009
ISBN 0231137761, 9780231137768
536 pages
via johnsonleow

Reviews: Knakkergaard (MedieKultur, 2010), Whittington (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2010), Jaeckle (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (Index missing, 58 MB, no OCR, updated on 2023-3-9)

Siegfried Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (2002–) [EN, ES]

“Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old.

Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of ‘dreamers and modelers’ of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. ‘Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,’ Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others.”

Originally published as Archäologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und Sehens, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002.

Foreword by Timothy Druckrey
Translated by Gloria Custance
Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262240491, 9780262240499
375 pages

Reviews: Simon Werrett (Technology and Culture, 2007), Digital Creativity (2007), Simone Natale (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012), Stephanie Lam (n.d.).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (English, trans. Gloria Custance, 2006, 10 MB, updated on 2020-3-24)
Arqueología de los Medios. Hacia el tiempo profundo de la visión y la audición técnica (Spanish, trans. Alvaro Moreno-Hoffmann, 2011, 9 MB, added 2015-6-1 via Will, updated on 2020-3-24)

Olga Goriunova (ed.): Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing (2014)

“Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society.”

Texts by Andrew Goffey, Simon Yuill, Matthew Fuller, Luciana Parisi and M. Beatrice Fazi, Adrian Mackenzie, Michael Murtaugh, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Brigitte Kaltenbacher, Annet Dekker, and Olga Goriunova.

Publisher Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2014
New Media and Technology series
ISBN 1623560942, 9781623560942
285 pages

Software studies page on Monoskop

Publisher

PDF, ARG