We’re experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists’ close readings of contemporary media with scientists’ discussions of the science and math that inform them.
This text includes contributions by established and emerging scholars performing across-the-aisle research on new technologies, exploring topics such as facial and gait recognition; EEG and audiovisual materials; surveillance; and sound and images in relation to questions of sexual identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and class and includes examples from a range of films and TV shows including Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Morgan, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Through a variety of critical, theoretical, proprioceptive, and speculative lenses, the collection facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration and provides readers with ways of responding to these new technologies.
Edited by:
Professor Carol Vernallis (Stanford University USA),
Professor Holly Rogers (Goldsmiths University of London,
UK),
Dr. Jonathan Leal (Postdoctoral Researcher),
Selmin Kara (OCAD University,
Canada)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 752g
ISBN: 9781501357039
ISBN 10: 1501357034
Series: New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
Pages: 472
Publication Date: 13 January 2022
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments Contributors Introduction Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis Part I: AI and Robotics 1. Could the AI of Our Dreams Ever Become Reality? Jay McClelland 2. Director Alex Garland Converses with Cybermedia’s Scientists and Media Scholars Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis 3. (S)Ex Machina and the Cartesian Theater of the Absurd Simon D. Levy and Charles W. Lowney 4. Epiphany, Infinity and Transcendent AI Zachary Mason Part II: Big Data, Sentience, and the Universe 5. A MASSIVE Swirl of Pixels: Algorithms in Radiohead’s ‘Go to Sleep’ Steen Ledet Christiansen 6. The Rise of the Machine: Body-Knowing, Neural Nets, and Emergent Freedom Charles W. Lowney 7. The Quantum Computer as Sci-Fi’s Favorite Character Leonardo P. G. De Assis 8. Composer Ben Salisbury Discusses Scoring Science for Alex Garland Holly Rogers, John McGrath, Carol Vernallis, and Dale Chapman 9. Ex Machina and the Question of Consciousness Murray Shanahan Part III: The Neuroscience of Affect and Event Perception 10. ‘A Solid Popularity Arc’: Affective Economies in Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Dale Chapman 11. Cognitive Boundaries, ‘Nosedive’ and Under the Skin: Interview with Jeffrey Zacks Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, and Dale Chapman 12. Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective Approach Frederick Aldama and Laura Wagner Part IV: The Digital West 13. The Philosophy of Westworld Paul Skokowski 14. New Visions of the Old West: A.I., Self, and Other in Westworld Christopher Minz 15. Scoring Music for Westworld Then and Now: A Cognitive Perspective Annabel J. Cohen Part V: Interface, Desire, Collectivity 16. Director Terence Nance Discusses Random Acts of Flyness Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Holly Rogers, Liz Reich and the contributors of Cybermedia 17. The Gift of Black Sonics: Interface and Ontology in Sorry to Bother You and Random Acts of Flyness Liz Reich 18. Technology, Chaos, and the Nimble Subversion of Random Acts of Flyness Eric Lyon 19. Expecting the Twist: How Media Navigate the Intersections Among Different Sources of Prior Knowledge Noah Fram 20. Face Color Bevil Conway Part VI: Productive Neuropathologies 21. Digital Vitalism Marta Figlerowicz 22. Neuroplasticity: From Experience to Healing Sara Ferrando Colomer 23. Where is My Mind? Mr. Robot and the Digital Neuropolis Patricia Pisters 24. Dopamine Circuits: Wanting, Liking, Habits, and Goals. An Interview about Mr. Robot with Neuroscientist Talia Lerner Jonathan Leal, Carol Vernallis, and Patricia Pisters 25. The Taste of Cybermedia: An Interview with Hojoon Lee, The Lee Lab at Northwestern University Julia Peres Guimaraes, Selmin Kara, and Carol Vernallis Index
Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and Studying Twentieth Century Music (2021) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017) and Transmedia Directors (2019). Selmin Kara is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University, Canada. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and ecological imaginary in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary. Jonathan Leal is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, USA. A native of the South Texas borderlands, he studies and creates music and narrative across sonic, visual, and textual media to unpack the legacies of colonialism in and beyond the U.S. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, a compilation album celebrating the Rio Grande Valley’s musical geographies, as well as Futuro Conjunto, a transmedia, Chicanx speculative fiction album named one of the best Latinx releases of 2020 by Pitchfork and Texas Highways magazines.
Reviews for Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision
The membrane between media and mind has been dissolving for a century. Cybermedia turns the membrane into an irrigation system. A new kind of practice as much as a book, Cybermedia brings makers, scientists and scholars into dialogues that pass through old borders, subtly transformed and transforming. From comic books to paranoia, neurotransmitters to Radiohead, Cybermedia opens a new landscape of social-technical minds and media as things to study and ways of studying them. * Sean Cubitt, Professor of Screen Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia *
