Biopolitical Screens

Biopolitical Screens PDF Author: Pasi Valiaho
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262548976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art. In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war. Väliaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen platforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptual foundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visual economy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of “neuropower”; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines three instances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime of sensibility rather than reinforce it.

Biopolitical Screens

Biopolitical Screens PDF Author: Pasi Valiaho
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262548976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book

Book Description
An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art. In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war. Väliaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen platforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptual foundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visual economy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of “neuropower”; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines three instances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime of sensibility rather than reinforce it.

Biopolitical Media

Biopolitical Media PDF Author: Allen Meek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131750089X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book presents an historical account of media and catastrophe that engages with theories of biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and others. It explains how responses to catastrophe in media and cultural criticism over the past 150 years are embedded in biological conceptions of life and death, contamination and immunity, race and species. Mediated catastrophe is often understood today in terms of collective memory and according to therapeutic or redemptive accounts of trauma. In contrast to these approaches this book emphasizes the use of media to record, archive and analyze physical appearance and movement; to capture viewer attention through shock; to monitor and control bodies in economies of production and consumption; to enmesh social relations in information networks; and situate subjects in discourses of victimhood, immunity, survival and resilience. Chapters are focused on historical case studies of early photography, Nazi propaganda, colonial stereotypes, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the war on terror.

Virtual Menageries

Virtual Menageries PDF Author: Jody Berland
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026235201X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

Islamic State, Biopolitics and Media Governmentality

Islamic State, Biopolitics and Media Governmentality PDF Author: Lewis Rarm
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003848990
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
This book analyses the Islamic State’s (IS) media and governance strategy from a critical media and cultural studies perspective. It deploys Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage and Foucault’s theories of dispositif (dispositive, apparatus) and biopower to understand the ways in which IS governed its subjects during the tenure of its so-called ‘caliphate’. This theoretical triangulation is used to situate the group as more than just a terrorist organisation, but rather as a more amorphous force with proclivities toward governance. The analysis of globally fluid and conjunctive terrorist strategies executed through media, governance and conduct, as part of and produced by IS’s dispositif, manifests in the group’s epistemology, discourse and social ontology. To analyse these processes, the book deploys a dispositif analysis of official IS administrative documents, media produced by the group’s English-language media wing (al-Hayat Media Center), and IS Twitter activity, including the use of nonhuman bots. In doing so, it seeks to reveal the resonance between IS’s media and governmental discourses, develop dispositif theory, and to argue for more context-specific formulations of biopolitics. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Terrorism Studies, social theory, media theory and International Relations.

Screen Ecologies

Screen Ecologies PDF Author: Larissa Hjorth
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026233402X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues through digital and visual media are riddled with irony, because the resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste associated with digital devices contribute to environmental damage and climate change. Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region—a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media. Screen Ecologies shows how new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. It investigates such topics as artists' exploration of alternative ways to represent the environment; regional stories of media innovation and climate change; the tensions between amateur and professional art; the emergence of biennials, triennials, and new arts organizations; the theme of water in regional art; new models for networked collaboration; and social media's move from private to public realms. A generous selection of illustrations shows a range of artist's projects.

Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins

Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins PDF Author: Andrey Makarychev
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004513795
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Andrey Makarychev approaches populism through a critical biopolitical lens and shows that populist narratives are grounded intrinsically in corporeality, sexuality, health, bodily life and religious practices. The author demonstrates that populism is a phenomenon deeply rooted in mass culture. He compares three countries -- Estonia, Ukraine and Russia--that all share post-Soviet experiences offering a broad spectrum of populist discourses. The three case studies display the interconnection between biopower and populism through references to culture, media, art, theatrical performances and literature, raising new questions and directions for understanding traditional accounts of populism. This work was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 822682: "Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe: neo-traditionalism and neo-feudalism – POPREBEL".

Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television

Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television PDF Author: Angelo Restivo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478003448
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
With its twisty serialized plots, compelling antiheroes, and stylish production, Breaking Bad has become a signature series for a new golden age of television, in which some premium cable shows have acquired the cultural prestige usually reserved for the cinema. In Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television Angelo Restivo uses the series as a point of departure for theorizing a new aesthetics of television: one based on an understanding of the cinematic that is tethered to affect rather than to medium or prestige. Restivo outlines how Breaking Bad and other contemporary “cinematic” television series take advantage of the new possibilities of postnetwork TV to create an aesthetic that inspires new ways to think about how television engages with the everyday. By exploring how the show presents domestic spaces and modes of experience under neoliberal capitalism in ways that allegorize the perceived twenty-first-century failures of masculinity, family, and the American Dream, Restivo shows how the televisual cinematic has the potential to change the ways viewers relate to and interact with the world.

The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory

The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory PDF Author: Hunter Vaughan
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783088249
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory offers a unique and progressive survey of screen theory and how it can be applied to a range of moving-image texts and sociocultural contexts. Focusing on the “handbook” angle, the book includes only original essays from established authors in the field and new scholars on the cutting edge of helping screen theory evolve for the twenty-first-century vistas of new media, social shifts and geopolitical change. This method guarantees a strong foundation and clarity for the canon of film theory, while also situating it as part of a larger genealogy of art theories and critical thought, and reveals the relevance and utility of film theories and concepts to a wide array of expressive practices and specified arguments. The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory is at once inclusive, applicable and a chance for writers to innovate and really play with where they think the field is, can and should be heading.

From Water to Wine

From Water to Wine PDF Author: Jess Auerbach
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487524331
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Part monograph, part methods handbook, and including poetry, photos and other media, this highly original work explores the emergent middle class in Angola through the lens of the senses.

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes PDF Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030364151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.