Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. His books include The Cinematic Body (1993), Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), Discognition (2016), and Digital Music Videos (2017).

A quarter-century back, MTV’s Amp showcased electronica videos, eerie creatures of beats-driven posthumanism. The show ended, but the videos multiplied, digital tinkering to visualize hip-hop, R&B, and new divas alongside EDM for stop-start viewing on YouTube. Steven Shaviro philosopher of speculative fiction, at last names this core category: the rhythm image. Gazing and auditing, applying theory as needed, he makes that tweak in the assemblage on your screen a frontier. The filmic nugget pulsates, in his cuts from micro to macro analysis, becoming a fundamental cultural reshaping—the visual groove as 21st century homeland.

• List of FiguresPreface 1. The Rhythm Image2. Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision (Massive Attack)3. Cyborg Avatars (Dawn Richard)4. Pulses of Distraction (Tierra Whack)5. Living With Time-Space Compression (Bonobo)6. The Passion According to FKA twigs7. Vanishing Voices (Moses Sumney)8. Metamorphoses of a Severed Head (The Weeknd)9. Submerged (Tkay Maidza)AfterwordBooks and Articles CitedMusic and Videos CitedIndex

Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. His books include The Cinematic Body (1993), Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), Discognition (2016), and Digital Music Videos (2017).

A quarter-century back, MTV’s Amp showcased electronica videos, eerie creatures of beats-driven posthumanism. The show ended, but the videos multiplied, digital tinkering to visualize hip-hop, R&B, and new divas alongside EDM for stop-start viewing on YouTube. Steven Shaviro philosopher of speculative fiction, at last names this core category: the rhythm image. Gazing and auditing, applying theory as needed, he makes that tweak in the assemblage on your screen a frontier. The filmic nugget pulsates, in his cuts from micro to macro analysis, becoming a fundamental cultural reshaping—the visual groove as 21st century homeland.

• List of FiguresPreface 1. The Rhythm Image2. Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision (Massive Attack)3. Cyborg Avatars (Dawn Richard)4. Pulses of Distraction (Tierra Whack)5. Living With Time-Space Compression (Bonobo)6. The Passion According to FKA twigs7. Vanishing Voices (Moses Sumney)8. Metamorphoses of a Severed Head (The Weeknd)9. Submerged (Tkay Maidza)AfterwordBooks and Articles CitedMusic and Videos CitedIndex