The Light: Exploring Socially Improvised Movements Using Wearable Sensors in a Performative Installation

This work explores the potential of a set, comprised of wearable sensors, a performative lighting installation, and a public museum space, to inspire performative and collaborative social behavior among members of the public. Our installation, The Light, was first exhibited as part of the Late at Tate Britain event in 2019. In this paper we discuss the concept and technological implementation behind the work, and present an initial qualitative study of observations made on the people who interacted with it. The study provides a subjective evaluation based on people’s facial expressions and body language as they improvise and coordinate their movements with one another and with the installation

Touch in the Time of Corona

The COVID-19 pandemic has hooked us all into digital networks as our access to cities, work and social gatherings is restricted and reconfigured. Weaving together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies, this short volume reflects on how the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic

Editorial: Rendering Research

To render is to give something “cause to be” or “hand over” (from the Latin reddere “give back”) and enter into an obligation to do or make something like a decision. More familiar perhaps in computing, to render is to take an image or file and convert it into another format or apply a modification of some kind; or in the case of 3D animation or scanning, to render is to animate it or give it volume. In this issue, we ask, what does it mean to render research? How does the rendering of research reinforce certain limitations of thought and action? We ask these questions in the context of more and more demands on researchers to produce academic outputs in standardised forms, in peer-reviewed journals and such like that are legitimised by normative values. So, then, how to render research otherwise

The Message is Murder

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, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal

Touch in the Time of Corona

The COVID-19 pandemic has hooked us all into digital networks as our access to cities, work and social gatherings is restricted and reconfigured. Weaving together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies, this short volume reflects on how the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic

Virtual corporeality: narrative and spectacle in Hollywood VR cinema

This thesis is an inquiry into the emergence, development and eventual transmutation of the 'virtual reality' (VR) subgenre. I critically intervene in discourse on cinema, digital media, phenomenology and science fiction (SF) to explore how these films refract and enact Hollywood cinema‘s engagement with digital media and imaging technologies. Given that these films are about bodily immersive mediated experiences, I argue, their reflexive displays of special effects technologies are far from anti- or contra-narrative, as certain analyses imply. My emphasis on the imbrication of narrative and spectacle motivates a critical questioning of further, often interrelated and mutually sustaining dichotomies between body and mind, cognition and affect, cinema and digital media, real and virtual, reflection and immersion. Via close textual analysis with a phenomenological leaning, I explore how these films variously disrupt such binaries. As both old and new media produce and address differently mediated publics, they adopt, adapt and assimilate the narrative-aesthetic modalities of other (digital) media, negotiating their impacts upon our phenomenological relations to the world and to cinema. Through reflexive allusions to their increasingly mediated extradiegetic contexts, they function to uphold cinema‘s ability both to present innovative technological spectacle and to represent contemporary experiential realities. I explore how earlier VR films Tron and The Lawnmower Man aesthetically and conceptually 'map' VR, and how Strange Days and The Matrix ambivalently explore the implications of intensified and widespread virtual experience in radically different ways. I characterise Avatar and Source Code as 'Post-VR' cinema, in which formerly upheld dichotomies – particularly between 'real' and 'virtual' – prove untenably anachronistic. I ultimately maintain the value of an approach to popular cinema which apprehends genre, context and convergence, while advocating sustained and detailed close analysis as a means of grasping cinema‘s narrative-aesthetic functions in the digital age

Contradiction That Never Was. : Epigenesis versus Modularity in Evolutionary Aesthetics

Peer reviewe

The light: exploring socially improvised movements using wearable sensors in a performative installation

This work explores the potential of a set comprised of wearable sensors, a performative lighting installation, and a public museum space, to inspire performative and collaborative social behavior among members of the public. Our installation, The Light, was first exhibited as part of the Late at Tate Britain event in 2019. In this paper we discuss the concept and technological implementation behind the work, and present an initial qualitative study of observations made of the people who interacted with it. The study provides a subjective evaluation based on people's facial expressions and body language as they improvise and coordinate their movements with one another and with the installation