Federico Giordano – författare

The digital age has witnessed the development of a new kind of archive: immaterial, “living and moving,” largely user-generated, and conceived for managing a wide variety of audio-visual materials, besides traditional films and videos. The first part of this anthology investigates the ways in which media forms like web-documentaries, video art and digital art, web series, amateur productions, and also mobile films can be stored and preserved within the new digital repositories. The second part focuses on archival and preservation practices of the video game. This approach understands the archive not simply as a “memory box,” but as a fully contemporary practice that locates new media objects in the present and acknowledges their changing cultural and social configurations. The democratic, often immaterial, living, mobile nature of contemporary archives forces us to question whether or not the traditional notion of “the archive” still has a heuristic value. Or if it would be perhaps better to reject any “conventional” idea of archive and embrace the notion of anarchive.

What is the current status of the human body in the digital era? Taking this question as a starting point, the book explores how our perception of the body has been modified by the advent of new media (videogames, transmedia platforms, ARGs), by the rise of recent devices such as wearable technologies,Virtual Reality, cosmetic surgery and by the creation of different narratives such as science-fictions, and TV series. Which kind of identities emerge within this context? How is our body image disseminated? In the ‘Post-Cinematic’ or ‘Post-Media’ condition, the body becomes a changeable, flexible, ‘unstable object’. The first part of this volume analyses the presence of body in the field of television/film and in social media (changes, aesthetics, new spaces); the second part focuses on the relationship between the digital media and the viewer/user, showing how the spectator’s body is subject to a constant shape modification.