Cybermedia

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and Studying Twentieth Century Music (2021) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017) and Transmedia Directors (2019).Selmin Kara is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University, Canada. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and ecological imaginary in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary. Jonathan Leal is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, USA. A native of the South Texas borderlands, he studies and creates music and narrative across sonic, visual, and textual media to unpack the legacies of colonialism in and beyond the U.S. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, a compilation album celebrating the Rio Grande Valley’s musical geographies, as well as Futuro Conjunto, a transmedia, Chicanx speculative fiction album named one of the best Latinx releases of 2020 by Pitchfork and Texas Highways magazines.

The membrane between media and mind has been dissolving for a century. Cybermedia turns the membrane into an irrigation system. A new kind of practice as much as a book, Cybermedia brings makers, scientists and scholars into dialogues that pass through old borders, subtly transformed and transforming. From comic books to paranoia, neurotransmitters to Radiohead, Cybermedia opens a new landscape of social-technical minds and media as things to study and ways of studying them.

• AcknowledgmentsContributorsIntroductionJonathan Leal and Carol VernallisPart I: AI and Robotics1. Could the AI of Our Dreams Ever Become Reality?Jay McClelland2. Director Alex Garland Converses with Cybermedia’s Scientists and Media ScholarsJonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis3. (S)Ex Machina and the Cartesian Theater of the AbsurdSimon D. Levy and Charles W. Lowney4. Epiphany, Infinity and Transcendent AIZachary MasonPart II: Big Data, Sentience, and the Universe5. A MASSIVE Swirl of Pixels: Algorithms in Radiohead’s ‘Go to Sleep’Steen Ledet Christiansen6. The Rise of the Machine: Body-Knowing, Neural Nets, and Emergent FreedomCharles W. Lowney7. The Quantum Computer as Sci-Fi’s Favorite CharacterLeonardo P. G. De Assis 8. Composer Ben Salisbury Discusses Scoring Science for Alex GarlandHolly Rogers, John McGrath, Carol Vernallis, and Dale Chapman9. Ex Machina and the Question of ConsciousnessMurray Shanahan Part III: The Neuroscience of Affect and Event Perception10. ‘A Solid Popularity Arc’: Affective Economies in Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’Dale Chapman11. Cognitive Boundaries, ‘Nosedive’ and Under the Skin: Interview with Jeffrey ZacksCarol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, and Dale Chapman12. Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective ApproachFrederick Aldama and Laura WagnerPart IV: The Digital West13. The Philosophy of WestworldPaul Skokowski14. New Visions of the Old West: A.I., Self, and Other in WestworldChristopher Minz15. Scoring Music for Westworld Then and Now: A Cognitive PerspectiveAnnabel J. CohenPart V: Interface, Desire, Collectivity16. Director Terence Nance Discusses Random Acts of FlynessCarol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Holly Rogers, Liz Reich and the contributors of Cybermedia17. The Gift of Black Sonics: Interface and Ontology in Sorry to Bother You and Random Acts of FlynessLiz Reich 18. Technology, Chaos, and the Nimble Subversion of Random Acts of FlynessEric Lyon19. Expecting the Twist: How Media Navigate the Intersections Among Different Sources of Prior KnowledgeNoah Fram20. Face ColorBevil ConwayPart VI: Productive Neuropathologies21. Digital VitalismMarta Figlerowicz22. Neuroplasticity: From Experience to HealingSara Ferrando Colomer23. Where is My Mind? Mr. Robot and the Digital NeuropolisPatricia Pisters24. Dopamine Circuits: Wanting, Liking, Habits, and Goals. An Interview about Mr. Robot with Neuroscientist Talia LernerJonathan Leal, Carol Vernallis, and Patricia Pisters25. The Taste of Cybermedia: An Interview with Hojoon Lee, The Lee Lab at Northwestern UniversityJulia Peres Guimaraes, Selmin Kara, and Carol Vernallis Index