|
|
|
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)
In Materializing New Media, Anna Munster offers an alternative aesthetic genealogy for digital culture. Eschewing the prevailing Cartesian aesthetic that aligns the digital with the disembodied, the formless, and the placeless, Munster seeks to "materialize" digital culture by demonstrating that its aesthetics have reconfigured bodily experience and reconceived materiality. Her topics range from artistic experiments in body-computer interfaces to the impact that corporeal interaction and geopolitical circumstances have on producing new media art and culture. She argues that new media, materiality, perception, and artistic practices now mutually constitute "information aesthetics." Information aesthetics is concerned with new modes of sensory engagement in which distributed spaces and temporal variation play crucial roles. In analyzing the experiments that new media art performs with the materiality of space and time, Munster demonstrates how new media has likewise changed our bodies and those of others in global information culture. Materializing New Media calls for a re-examination of the roles of both body and affect in their relation to the virtual and to abstract codes of information. It offers a nonlinear approach to aesthetics and art history based on a concept of "folding" that can discern certain kinds of proximities and continuations across distances in time (in particular between the Baroque and the digital). Finally, it analyzes digital culture through a logic of the differential rather than of the binary. This allows the author to overcome a habit of futurism, which until now has plagued analyses of new media art and culture. Technology is now not seen as surpassing the human body but continually reconfiguring it and constitutive of it..
Price: $19.49
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Materializing Culture)
Proust's famous madeleine captures the power of food to evoke some of our deepest memories. Why does food hold such power? What does the growing commodification and globalization of food mean for our capacity to store the past in our meals ñ in the smell of olive oil or the taste of a fresh-cut fig? This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. Sutton challenges and expands anthropology's current focus on issues of embodiment, memory and material culture, especially in relation to transnational migration and the flow of culture across borders and boundaries. The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where Islanders claim to remember meals long past -- both humble and spectacular ñ provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Despite the growing interest in anthropological accounts of food and in the cultural construction of memory, the intersection of food with memory has not been accorded sustained examination. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in speciality cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the 'anthropology of the senses'. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations. .
Price: $28.17
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua
Why in the current era of globalization, does nationality remain a relevant dimension of personal and collective identities? Through a critique of recent approaches to nationalism and consumption and a focus on nation-making in Papua New Guinea, it highlights the instrumental roles of commercial media and commodity consumption in producing images and ideals of nationhood..
Price: $22.94
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
At Home with Computers (Materializing Culture)
New technologies are profoundly reshaping the world around us. Home computers – unheard of two decades ago – now play an intimate role as personal possessions in many people's lives. For some, computer games may be vital to winding-down after a busy day, while for others the home computer represents only work or is a means through which to socialize in cyberspace. Powerfully symbolic of both future and present trends, computers are increasingly seen as essential home purchases. This book is the first sustained examination of the revealing role computers play in our domestic lives. Do computers cause or help to resolve arguments? What role does gender play in negotiating their use? Who spends the most time with the computer? How does the importance of home computers change as we move from childhood through careers to retirement? Drawing upon topical theories from material culture, technology and consumption studies, Lally traces the social life of these machines and provides unique insights into the many different ways in which they are transformed into highly personal possessions. The result is an absorbing account of everyday life in the information age. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and anyone who wants to get to know how their home computer affects their family life. .
Price: $23.92
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Materializing Culture)
On buses, trains, and streets over the past decade and more, youths in particular but increasingly older people as well tune into their personal stereos and tune out city sounds. Why? What does the personal stereo mean to these people and to urban culture more generally? Does it heighten reality? Enable people to cope? Isolate? Create a space? Combat boredom? Far too commonplace and enduring to be considered a fashion accessory, the personal stereo has become a potent artefact symbolizing contemporary urban life. This book opens up a new area of urban studies, the auditory experience of self and place. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. Urban, cultural and anthropological studies have been dominated by explanations of experiences drawing upon notions of visuality. But culture always has an auditory component that shapes attitudes and behaviour -- perhaps nowhere more so than in the city where sound is intensified. This book challenges strictly visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. The author reformulates our understanding of how people, through the senses, negotiate central experiences of the urban, such as space, place, time and the management of everyday experience, and examines the critical role technology plays. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a fresh and incisive approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, or media and communication studies. .
Price: $28.59
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Materializing the Immaterial: The Architecture of Wallace Cunningham
This generously illustrated book assesses the architectural vision of Wallace Cunningham, the innovative and intuitive Southern California architect whose buildings reveal light and embody motion and spirituality. From small mountain cabins to urban townhouses, from waterfront residences to museums, Cunningham’s structures respond poetically and functionally to the land—and to the cityscapes in which they are set. His works reflect the architect’s belief that “buildings are not just visual…buildings need to radiate emotion.” The book traces Cunningham’s development from his youth in the architecturally rich city of Buffalo through his apprenticeship at Taliesen, where he absorbed Frank Lloyd Wright’s theory of organic architecture, to his current practice in San Diego. Eighteen case studies of his projects, both built and unbuilt, illustrate how the architect opens his structures to sky, landscape, and views, and how he uses light to define and animate space. The book also includes a comprehensive record of Cunningham's works, publications, and exhibits. .
Price: $40.00
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Basics Materials (Basics)
|
|
Car Cultures (Materializing Culture)
Anyone who assumes that a car is simply a means to get from point A to point B, or who even thinks that they know what a car is, should read this book. Profoundly shaped by culture, the car gives rise to a wide range of emotions, from guilt about the environment in the UK to aboriginal concerns with car ‘corpses’, to struggles to keep the creatures ‘alive’ with everything but the proper spare parts in West Africa. Cars and their landscapes prove central to human life from its most intimate to the widest sense of global crisis, and are capable of inspiring epic passions.From road rage in Western Europe to the struggles of cab driving in Africa to the emergence of Black identity in the US, this book examines the essential humanity of the car, which includes the jealousies, gender differences, fears and moralities that cars give rise to. Firmly grounded in detailed ethnographic and historical scholarship, this is the first book to provide an informed sense of cars as one of the most familiar and significant forms of material culture. .
Price: $47.98
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Materializing Culture)
Hollywood has exerted a profound influence on British style and design. From its earliest days, Hollywood glamour in the form of make-up, hairstyles, and fashion was mimicked by women throughout Britain. But the influence of Hollywood was more than skin-deep. Nearly every form of British material culture in the twentieth century has been influenced to some extent by American style, disseminated through the medium of film to a broad and receptive market. With the erection of the Chrysler Building in New York in the late 20s, representing the city and modern American urban life, the Manhattan skyline became an enduring icon in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Not only Hollywood film, but jazz and American companies all combined to bring the new Moderne style to bear on Britain. The architecture of shops, cinemas, and factories all reflect this influence, as did various forms of transportation and the interiors of homes. Even as late as the consumer boom in the 80s, revivals celebrating the Moderne style were popular in Britain as well as abroad. This influence was naturally not without its critics. The very popularity of American design challenged the aesthetics and elitism of British high arts and remains controversial. Anyone interested in design, material culture, film or architecture will find this book to be a lucid and absorbing exploration of a popular aesthetic. .
Price: $5.31
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|