Suchergebnisse

This book investigates the aesthetic nature and purposes of computer culture in the contemporary world. It casts a cool eye on the claims of cybertopians, tracing the globalization of the new medium and enquiring into its effects on subjectivity and sociality

Abstract
COVID-19 is now part of the resources out of which any future must be made. The temptation is to curl back into private misery and fatalism. The opportunity is to further the design of neonationalist, neoliberal returns to pre-1917 norms of extreme wealth, extreme poverty, and unmitigated exploitation of technical and ecological resources. The challenge is to build a future of public health, wealth, education, and environmental justice.

Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.

Abstract
Zhang Qian's second-century B.C.E. reports on his travels through what is now the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang begin two millennia of mediations of this large and fraught region. This article's consideration of mediations on landscape begins with Tsui Hark's film Seven Swords, looking back to drawing and photography, and forward to geographic information systems and financial software, each giving their own, often complex, accounts of the land. This history, and the multiplicity of contemporary practices, raises the question of subjectivity: of who or what expresses and who or what observes or understands these layers of mediation, representation, and communication, in the past or today. The author argues that, for ecocritique in the age of terracide, aesthetics is not merely symptomatic or ideological, it is the one sure ground for a new politics.

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in semantic chains on their mutual indifference. Glitches are symbols whose nonhuman labor reveals the limits of humanism.

Ecocritical work on media has developed from a genre criticism of nature-themed films to address cinema, TV, and media arts more broadly as articulations of the human-natural relation and its mediation through technologies. Embracing the environmental impacts of product life cycles, from materials extraction and industrial production to energy use and recycling, these advances in ecocriticism have begun to address the differential experiences of affected populations. This essay looks at the "environmentalism of the poor" with specific reference to indigenous peoples affected by the digital media industries. It seeks to address a lacuna in mainstream Green politics, drawing on colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial analyses and indigenous methodologies, in order to propose a de-Westernizing move in ecopolitics.

Abstract
Studies of environmentalism in media and cultural studies have largely focused on the communication of political strategies and scientific truths, on representation, and on genre and thematic criticism. This article looks at current work on the environmental impacts of digital media and argues that this gives a new perspective on political economy of communications, media ethics and aesthetic forms

Technology has in general been seen as opposed to humanity: its object, even its enemy. The Grundrisse suggests, however, that technology can be understood as the actualized form of accumulated social knowledge. This actual form can then be understood from the standpoint of a dialectic in which the actual is capable of action only if it can convert its actuality into virtuality, that is to free itself for a future other than its actual present. Critical to this political project is work at the aesthetic level of media and communications technologies.