Cultural and Media Studies – serie

Due to shifts in the contexts of the production and presentation of the music video, more and more people start to talk about a possible end of this genre. At the same time disciplines such as visual-, film- and media-studies, art- and music-history begin to realize that despite the fact that the music video obviously has come of age, they still lack a well defined and matching methodical approach for analyzing and discussing videoclips.For the first time this volume brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future.

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field.Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future.This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term »totalitarian«: no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

Starting from an analysis of practices of participation in contemporary print and other media, the volume opens up a historical perspective, probing the potential of the concept of participatory cultures for the exploration of past forms of collaboration between individual and collective actors (i.e. authors, editors, publishers, fans, critics etc.). In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the historically, culturally, and medially specific forms and functions as well as on the economic, political and institutional parameters that contributed to the emergence and transformation of what turn out to be precarious alliances.

Besides products and services multinational corporations also sell myths, values and immaterial goods. Such »meta-goods« (e.g. prestige, beauty, strength) are major selling points in the context of successful marketing and advertising. Fashion adverts draw on deeply rooted human values, ideals and desires such as values and symbols of social recognition, beautification and rejuvenation. Although the reference to such meta-goods is obvious to some consumers, their rootedness in philosophical theories of human nature is less apparent, even for the marketers and advertisers themselves. This book is of special interest for researchers and students in the fields of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Marketing, Advertising, Fashion, Cultural Critique, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology, and for anyone interested in the ways in which fashion operates.

Michael D. Fowler presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the sound world of traditional Japanese gardens by drawing from the diverse fields of semiotics, acoustic ecology, philosophy, mathematical modelling, architecture, music, landscape theory and acoustic analysis. Using projects - ranging from data-visualisations, immersive sound installations, algorithmically generated meta-gardens and proto-architectural form finding missions - as creative paradigms, the book offers a new framework for artistic inquiry in which the sole objective is the generation of new knowledge through the act of spatial thinking.

Fractals suggest recursivity, infinity and the repetition of a principle of order. They are digital pictures of the universe's continuous movement ignored by mankind during millennia.This book investigates the relationship existing between geometries and technology, and how it guided cognitive processes and thus the organization of narrative spaces. The author proposes a new approach for the study of media remarking that from Bacon's camera obscura to von Neumann's computers both geometries and technology strongly influenced the organization of narrative spaces, which acquired a fractal character.

This volume unravels the debates on the »Participation Age«: Instead of perpetuating visions of social »all-inclusion« or the »digital divide«, the collection reclaims collectivity as an effect of technological and historical conditions.Thinking of participation both as promise and duty, the contributions analyse the attractions and impositions connected to the socio-technical formation of collectivities. The constraints of participation are addressed by focusing on the mutual shaping of user practices and technological environments. It is hence a relational thinking that allows specifying the manifold interconnections of technology, practices and discourses.

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop?Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies.With contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman.

The fields of cross-cultural and cultural psychology both acknowledge the role of `culture' for the constitution of a meaningful practice. There are notable differences as well as remarkable commonalities between nomologically oriented cross-cultural psychology on the one hand and interpretive cultural psychology on the other. Contributions to this book discuss recent theoretical and methodological approaches from both fields in order to explore their joint potential for an advancement of the concept of culture, for the theoretical conceptualization and methodical completion of comparative cultural studies and the scientific understanding of cultural difference.This volume includes contributions by Ernest E. Boesch, Kenneth J. Gergen, Rom Harré, Gustav Jahoda and Jaan Valsiner.

This book supports and deepens the existing interfaces between art, science, and technology – transgressing traditional principles and styles of research, and selectively overcoming the side-by-side coexistence in favour of an integrated »laboratory of the future«. Instead of relying on traditional dualisms like nature-culture, subject-object, as well as man and machine, heterogeneous networks with humans and non-humans (Latour) are opened in shared contexts of agency. New momentary propositions are developed, meeting the complexity of discovering, exploring, and inventing – things: things which do not exist just as given beings. The artists and theoreticians can pursue using the tools and techniques of science actively – not only to comment them but also to fathom their possibilities, and employ them in their artistic and scientific projects. Machines as Agency is an artistic perspective.

This book explores Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Alexander Kluge's analyses of the role that a rejuvenation in the capacity for imagination can play in encouraging us to reconceive the possibilities of the past, the present, and the future outside of the parameters of the status quo. The concept of imagination to which the title of the book refers is not a strictly defined, stable concept, but rather a term which is employed to refer to a capacity that facilitates both an active, creative relationship to one's environment, and a process of mediation between the outside world and one's own experiences and memories.Through a detailed analysis of their engagements with subjects that span a broad range of historical and thematic contexts (including topics as diverse as literature, children's play, film, photography, history, and television) the book charts the extent to which the concept of imagination plays a central role in Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge's explorations of a mode of perception and experience which could serve as a catalyst for the creation and sustenance of a desire for a different kind of future.