D. Fox Harrell: Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013)

13 May 2018, dusan

“An argument that great expressive power of computational media arises from the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.

In Phantasmal Media, D. Fox Harrell considers the expressive power of computational media. He argues, forcefully and persuasively, that the great expressive potential of computational media comes from the ability to construct and reveal phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination. These ubiquitous and often-unseen phantasms—cognitive phenomena that include sense of self, metaphors, social categories, narrative, and poetic thinking—influence almost all our everyday experiences. Harrell offers an approach for understanding and designing computational systems that have the power to evoke these phantasms, paying special attention to the exposure of oppressive phantasms and the creation of empowering ones. He argues for the importance of cultural content, diverse worldviews, and social values in computing. The expressive power of phantasms is not purely aesthetic, he contends; phantasmal media can express and construct the types of meaning central to the human condition.

Harrell discusses, among other topics, the phantasm as an orienting perspective for developers; expressive epistemologies, or data structures based on subjective human worldviews; morphic semiotics (building on the computer scientist Joseph Goguen’s theory of algebraic semiotics); cultural phantasms that influence consensus and reveal other perspectives; computing systems based on cultural models; interaction and expression; and the ways that real-world information is mapped onto, and instantiated by, computational data structures.

The concept of phantasmal media, Harrell argues, offers new possibilities for using the computer to understand and improve the human condition through the human capacity to imagine.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 9780262019330, 0262019337
xix+420 pages

Reviews: John Harwood (Artforum, 2014), Brian Reffin Smith (Leonardo, 2015).

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WorldCat

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Ada Journal, Nos. 2–3: Feminist Game Studies / Feminist Science Fiction (2013)

12 November 2013, dusan

“In the inaugural issue of this journal, Mia Consalvo challenged feminist media studies scholars to confront toxic gamer culture, like that faced by Anita Sarkeesian in response to her Kickstarter campaign, through our research, by documenting, archiving, analyzing, and responding to sexism, racism, ageism, and homophobia in games and game spaces. This issue features six original articles that, in unique and methodologically diverse ways, respond to Consalvo’s challenge.” (from the Introduction)

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Issue no. 2: Feminist Game Studies
Edited by Nina Huntemann, June 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Publisher University of Oregon Libraries
ISSN 2325-0496

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“The essays in this issue take us from the past, through Clarissa Lee’s reconsideration of the work of mid-20th-century physicists Emmy Noether and Maria Goeppert Mayer and Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s engagement with the race and class politics of New York City gentrification as refracted through art and fiction, to a wide variety of speculative futures. Many of them take us to the cyborg, yet they do not simply repeat Haraway’s influential figure. For Jilly Dreadful, the cyborg is one among a range of literary tropes that expands into a mode of storytelling; for Deanna Day, the cyborg should be left behind in favor of the critical lens of the zombie. ” (from the Introduction)

Issue no. 3: Feminist Science Fiction
Edited by Alexis Lothian, November 2013

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Curwen Best: The Politics of Caribbean Cyberculture (2008)

20 December 2012, dusan

This book covers significant new ground, examining the impact and imprint of new leading technology on a range of popular expressions. This technology includes the internet, the computer, the cell phone, television, and radio, among others. Some of the specific expressions and phenomena treated include: tourism, big budget films, sports, video games, entertainment culture, religious and gospel culture, mobile culture, popular music, writing and technology, and porn. The work shows acute awareness of the wider global contexts–social, cultural, political, and spiritual–that form the backdrop for Caribbean cultural reconfiguration. Curwen Best argues that Caribbean culture has gone wireless, virtual, and simulated in the age of the machines.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
ISBN 0230603769, 9780230603769
260 pages

publisher
google books

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