From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the …
Participation has become fashionable again, but at the same time it has always played a crucial role in our contemporary societies, and it has been omnipresent in a surprisingly large number of societal fields.
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning t…
Amperometric biosensors are widely used in point-of-care medical devices that help patients control blood glucose and cholesterol levels in an effective and convenient way. On the other hand, computer-aided technologies for biosensor design remain an actively developing field. In this chapter, we present a computational model for biosensor design that uses a reaction-diffusion equation. We have…
An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital media landscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and the digital divide. It may have been true once that (as the famous cartoon of the 1990s put it) “Nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet,” and that (as an MCI commercial of that era declared) on the Internet there is no…
So you’re the one getting this gift? Lucky you! Someone who knows you has visited the museum. They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you." This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experie…
On May 21, 2010, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt posted the following provocative questions online:“Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?”As recently as the mid-2000s, questions like these would have bee…
Taking a bottom-up perspective, this book explores local framings of a wide range of issues related to benefit-sharing, a growing concept in global environmental governance.Benefit-sharing in Environmental Governance draws on original case studies from South Africa, Namibia, Greece, Argentina, and Malaysia to shed light on what benefit-sharing looks like from the local viewpoint. These local-le…
In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir A…
The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, …