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University of California Press

Transmedia Frictions

The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities

by Marsha Kinder (Editor), Tara McPherson (Editor), N. Katherine Hayles (Contribution by), Lev Manovich (Contribution by), Yuri Tsivian (Contribution by), Patricia R. Zimmermann (Contribution by), Grahame Weinbren (Contribution by), Caroline Bassett (Contribution by), Steven F. Anderson (Contribution by), Stephen David Mamber (Contribution by), Edward Richard Branigan (Contribution by), John Hess (Contribution by), David Crane (Contribution by), Mark B.N. Hansen (Contribution by), Holly Willis (Contribution by), Guillermo Gomez Pena (Contribution by), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Contribution by), Herman Gray (Contribution by), Eric Jason Gordon (Contribution by), Cristina Venegas (Contribution by), John Thornton Caldwell (Contribution by)
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Jul 2014
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 416
ISBN: 9780520281851
Trim Size: 7 x 10
Illustrations: 26 b/w images

About the Book

Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term “transmedia” with “transnational,” they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital politics. Each part includes a substantive introduction by one of the editors.

Part 1 examines precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are protagonists in this discursive drama, focusing on how the transmedia frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively: N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefine medium specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian explore nondigital precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assess contemporary archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defend the open-ended mobility of newly emergent media.

In part 2, trios of essays address various ideologies of the digital: John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Wade Crane redraw contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina Venegas, and John T. Caldwell unearth database cities, portable homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark B.N. Hansen, Holly Willis, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña examine interactive bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color.

An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies, Transmedia Frictions provides sound historical perspective on the social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts, demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent.

About the Author

Marsha Kinder is Emerita University Professor at University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where she was the founding director of the Labyrinth Project. Her books include Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games and Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain.

Tara McPherson is Professor and the Hefner Endowed Chair of Censorship Studies in the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. She is author of Feminist in a Software Lab and Reconstructing Dixie, editor of Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, and coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface: Origins, Agents, and Alternative Archaeologies

PART I. MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND PRODUCTIVE PRECURSORS
Medium Specificity and Productive Precursors: An Introduction
Marsha Kinder

Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis
N. Katherine Hayles

Postmedia Aesthetics
Lev Manovich

If–Then–Else: Memory and the Path Not Taken
Edward Branigan

Cyberspace and Its Precursors: Lintsbach, Warburg, Eisenstein
Yuri Tsivian

Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History
Steve Anderson

Films Beget Digital Media
Stephen Mamber

Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story
Grahame Weinbren

Is This Not a Screen? Notes on the Mobile Phone and Cinema
Caroline Bassett

PART II. DIGITAL POSSIBILITIES AND THE REIMAGINING OF POLITICS, PLACE, AND THE SELF
Digital Possibilities and the Reimagining of Politics, Place, and the Self: An Introduction
Tara McPherson

Transnational/National Digital Imaginaries
John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann

Is (Cyber) Space the Place?
Herman Gray

Linkages: Political Topography and Networked Topology
David Wade Crane

The Database City: The Digital Possessive and Hollywood Boulevard
Eric Gordon

Cuba, Cyberculture, and the Exile Discourse
Cristina Venegas

Thinking Digitally/Acting Locally: Interactive Narrative, Neighborhood Soil, and La Cosecha Nuestra Community
John T. Caldwell

Video Installation Art as Uncanny Shock, or How Bruce Nauman’s Corridors Expand Sensory Life
Mark B. N. Hansen

Braingirls and Fleshmonsters
Holly Willis

Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt con Sangrita)
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Works Cited
Index

Reviews

“As someone who attended and participated in the 1999 Interactive Fictions conference, which in many ways consolidated more than a decade of theorizing about and experimenting with digital media, I was uncertain what to expect from Transmedia Frictions. What I found was a rich collection that looks both backward to reconstruct the paths not taken in digital theory and forward to imagine alternative ways of framing issues of medium specificity, digital identities, embodiment, and space/place. This collection is sure to transform how we theorize—and teach—the next phases of our profound and prolonged moment of media transition.”—Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“This anthology is both an essential document in the history of new media studies and a springboard for critical future work in this field. The breadth of this impressive work is itself instructive about our twenty-first-century academic and scholarly goals.”—Mark J. Williams, coeditor of Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture series