How to think about what it means to look and see: a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see—color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West—somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How do…
How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices. In Tactics of Interfacing, Ksenia Fedorova explores how digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world. With the advent of ubiquitous computing, the self becomes an object of technological application, in…
A collection that goes beyond the canon to analyze influential yet under-examined works of electronic music. This collection of writings on electronic music goes outside the canon to analyze influential works by under-recognized musicians. The contributors, many of whom are composers and performers themselves, offer their unsung musical heroes the sort of in-depth examinations usually reserved…
How “drowned town” literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and “death train” narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as …
BSTRACT This edited collection challenges and re-imagines what is ‘heritage’ in Britain as a globalised, vernacular, cosmopolitan ‘post-nation’. It takes its inspiration from the foundational work of public intellectual Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Hall was instrumental in calling out embedded elitist conceptions of ‘The Heritage’ of Britain. The book’s authors challenge us to r…
What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come f…
Episodes in the history of data, from early modern math problems to today's inescapable “dataveillance,” that demonstrate the dependence of data on culture. We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with …
An examination of how the mobile phone has become part of the fabric of society—as did such earlier technologies as the clock and the car. Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere…
An examination of emerging forms of knowledge creation using Web-based technologies, analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Today we are witnessing dramatic changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is created, codified, and communicated. This transformation is connected to the use of digital technologies and the virtualization of knowledge. In this book, scholars from a…
The evolution of activism against the expansion of copyright in the digital domain, with case studies of resistance including eBook and iTunes hacks. The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion…