Spectacular horizons: the birth of science fiction film, television, and radio, 1900-1959

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Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

To have done with the perspective of the (biological) body: Gaspar Noe´’s Enter the Void, somatic film theory and the biocinematic imaginary

In this paper, I examine the ways in which the relationship between spectator and screen has been figured in a body of recent scholarship on the cinema that both corporealises the cinematic event by focusing on the body of the spectator and the body of the film whilst, simultaneously, decorporealising it by seeing in the relation between spectator and screen the means to produce a new kind of properly cinematic thought, a new form of philosophy that can only be born out of this relation. Taking as paradigmatic examples of the different ways in which this relationship has been figured in recent film scholarship, I examine the works of Sobchack and Shaviro as examplars of the somatic turn in film studies, before going on to examine Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema. In the final section of the paper, I suggest, through an analysis of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, that, firstly, the potential pitfalls of somatic film theory and Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema as a tool for filmic analysis can be avoided. I then go on to argue that these different approaches do not need to be held apart from each other and that Deleuze's formulations can usefully inform a somatic film theory if we reconfigure the way we think about the cinematic body, moving from a biological understanding of it to an anatomical one. This discussion of the anatomical body is fleshed out in particular via an in-depth examination of the work of Waldby on the Visible Human Project and I conclude by suggesting that the cinematic spectator can be re-imagined or reanimated as a synthetic product of techno-bio-cultural and cinematic processes