Media Studies – serie

Desire indicates phenomena that are implicated in a productive ambiguity. These phenomena associate basic elements of human coexistence, while also referencing complex social processes and institutions. With today's new media we experience an assemblage of desire that maps out new relationships to the social body, to sexuality and gender questions, to ownership, and to the production, perception, and appropriation of moving images.This book brings together a broad spectrum of international positions relating to the time-based, immersive arts presented at the third B3 - the Biennial of the Moving Image Frankfurt/Main 2017 - which focuses on desire in the contemporary world. An extensive essay by Marc Ries develops a theoretical framework relating the moving image to desire.Contributions by Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon, Johan Grimonprez, Jonas Mekas, Larissa Sansour, Igor Simic, and Frederico Solmi.Desire/Begehren benennt Phänomene, die in eine produktive Ambivalenz eingeschrieben sind. Sie assoziieren Grundelemente menschlichen Zusammenlebens, verweisen aber zugleich auf komplexe gesellschaftliche Prozesse und Institutionen. Mit den gegenwärtigen Medien erleben und erfahren wir ein Gefüge des Begehrens, das neue Verhältnisse zum sozialen Körper, zur Sexualität und Geschlechterfrage, zum Eigentum und auch zur Produktion, Wahrnehmung und Aneignung von Bewegtbildern entwirft.Der Band versammelt ein Spektrum an internationalen Positionen zeitbasierter und immersiver Künste der dritten B3 - Biennale des Bewegten Bildes Frankfurt/Main 2017 - zum Begehren in der Gegenwart. Ein umfassender Essay von Marc Ries entwickelt einen theoretischen Rahmen der Beziehung des bewegten Bildes zum Begehren.Beiträge von Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon, Johan Grimonprez, Jonas Mekas, Larissa Sansour, Igor Simic und Frederico Solmi.

Why do we play games and why do we play them on computers? The contributors of »Games and Rules« take a closer look at the core of each game and the motivational system that is the game mechanics. Games are control circuits that organize the game world with their (joint) players and establish motivations in a dedicated space, a »Magic Circle«, whereas game mechanics are constructs of rules designed for interactions that provide gameplay. Those rules form the base for all the excitement and frustration we experience in games.This anthology contains individual essays by experts and authors with backgrounds in Game Design and Game Studies, who lead the discourse to get to the bottom of game mechanics in video games and the real world – among them Miguel Sicart and Carlo Fabricatore.

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief literary review of grief concepts and videogame theory, the book deep-dives into examples of tragic inter-character relationships from videogame history. Building on these examples, the book presents a case study on pregnancy loss as a potential grief experience that can be validated through game design dialogue.

Where do computer games »happen«? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of »space«, »place« and »territory« featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.

In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts.

Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind's relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use.

In contemporary society, digital images have become increasingly mobile. They are networked, shared on social media, and circulated across small and portable screens. Accordingly, the discourses of spreadability and circulation have come to supersede the focus on production, indexicality, and manipulability, which had dominated early conceptions of digital photography and film. However, the mobility of images is neither technologically nor conceptually limited to the realm of the digital. The edited volume re-examines the historical, aesthetical, and theoretical relevance of image mobility. The contributors provide a materialist account of images on the move – ranging from wired photography to postcards to streaming media.

Videogames allow us to immerse ourselves in worlds that are reflective of cultural phenomena. At the same time, games are in the process of occupying and utilising the real world as a part of the game. The book provides a combination of theoretical and practical approaches to mixed reality through the lenses of game studies and pedagogy. These novel approaches invite the reader to rethink their conceptions of games and mixed reality. They are complemented with classical analyses of games and applications in educational contexts. In uniting theory and hands-on approaches, the book provides a broad spectrum that facilitates and inspires interdisciplinary thinking and work.

Through a genealogy of photosensitive elements in media devices and artworks, this book investigates three dichotomies that impoverish debates and proposals in media art: material/immaterial, organic/machinic, and theory/practice. It combines historical and analytical approaches, through new materialism, media archaeology, cultural techniques and second-order cybernetics. Known media stories are reframed from an alternative perspective, elucidating photosensitivity as a metonymy to provide guidelines to art students, artists, curators and theoreticians – especially those who are committed to critical views of scientific and technological knowledge in aesthetic experimentations.

What do stories in games have in common with political narratives?This book identifies narrative strategies as mechanisms for meaning and manipulation in games and real life. It shows that the narrative mechanics so clearly identifiable in games are increasingly used (and abused) in politics and social life. They have »many faces«, displays and interfaces. They occur as texts, recipes, stories, dramas in three acts, movies, videos, tweets, journeys of heroes, but also as rewarding stories in games and as narratives in society – such as a career from rags to riches, the concept of modernity or market economy. Below their surface, however, narrative mechanics are a particular type of motivational design – of game mechanics.

How to study a media object on the web that is at the same time a documentary, a reportage, and a game which combines both fiction and non-fiction elements? Nicole Braida digs into the discursive and material structures and infrastructures of serious games, text-adventures, newsgames, interactive maps, and data visualizations, in which refugees and migrants become the subject of humanitarian discourse. Although the goal is to arouse empathy towards migrants, these »interactive practices« distinguish who is vulnerable and who is not. It supports the idea of a »migratory crisis«, which, the author argues, is actually the symptom of a deeper crisis of the humanitarian system itself.

Piazza virtuale by the group of artists known as Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project ever to appear on television, but from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today's social media. The ground-breaking event that took place during the 100 days of documenta IX in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-length study of this largely forgotten experiment: It documents the radicality of Piazza virtuale's approach, the novel programme ideas and the technical innovations. It also allows, via QR codes, direct access to videos from the show, which until now have been inaccessible.

Food is more than just nutrition. Its preparation, presentation and consumption is a multifold communicative practice which includes the meal's design and its whole field of experience. How is food represented in cookbooks, product packaging or in paintings? How is dining semantically charged? How is the sensuality of eating treated in different cultural contexts? In order to acknowledge the material and media-related aspects of eating as a cultural praxis, experts from media studies, art history, literary studies, philosophy, experimental psychology, anthropology, food studies, cultural studies and design studies share their specific approaches.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: »Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.« In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. Tatjana Neubauer examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places.

How do people live and interact in Cyberspace? Scientists and sci-fi writers have tackled this question for decades, yet the idea of a spatially distinct social site ›inside‹ the internet remained an imaginary for the longest time. In the 2010s, this changed: the proliferation of affordable virtual reality hardware and the emergence of social VR platforms attracted a growing number of tech enthusiasts for whom social life in VR has by now become a mundane, everyday reality. During his four-year ethnography, Felix Krell lived among, observed, and interviewed long-term users of the platform VRChat to explore what using VR technology really feels like for those with years of lived experience, and how members of emergent virtual communities negotiate their social interactions.

Radio signals keep making material, informational, political, and social connections in this world. Exploring these signals architectonically, the contributors engage with the situatedness of radio signal recordings in nature and with knowledge implied in radio communication. Rooted in experimental design and data feminism, the book presents innovative tools for navigating data by spanning media theory, information studies, and feminist new materialism. This offers an intersectional and post-disciplinary approach to computation, classification, and search that is accessible to artists, technologists, and researchers – facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and deepening the understanding of information technologies.

In the EU, the prevailing academic and scientific thought models, as well as communication processes and journalism, are deeply Eurocentric. Martín Oller Alonso critiques these structural issues, focusing on post-communist Central and Eastern Europe's recent EU members. He argues for a decolonization of knowledge and a journalistic-other approach, blending local sensibilities and collective imaginations. Emphasizing deliberative communication, his study offers fresh media and communication theory perspectives, relevant to professionals and researchers in various fields, addressing the challenges and opportunities in the European Union amidst globalization and cultural integration.

YouTube features a wide array of multimodal musical figurations, including fan-made music videos, musical aestheticisations of pre-circulating content, and musical self-performances. Jonas Wolf explores open-ended forms of musical creative relay on YouTube, delving into formal, imitative, affective, and (non-)institutional aspects of networked media remix and (self-)aestheticisation. Beyond creating value for non-musical fields of discourse, this study is directed at filling a gap in a largely ocularcentric domain of study. It provides a concise theory of vernacular composition within our time's total digital archive that accounts for socio-aesthetic phenomena and their relation to systems of knowledge, control, and discourse.

Cultural, social and economic production is always medially constituted, since it is formed through processing, storage and transmission of certain data or materials. This is why the concept of mediality can be used to stress the performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of techniques conversely interacts with the mediality in question. The contributors focus on a given cultural medium's genuine structure as a particular deployment without falling into some kind of hardware determinism, therefore considering culture beyond textuality.

This volume proposes a “deep internationalization” of media and communication studies by offering insights and guidance on how to integrate a cosmopolitan perspective in a variety of subfields of this discipline. Building on debates on de-Westernization and cosmopolitanism, the contributors advocate for the inclusion of both global and local perspectives and context-led approaches. They argue that acknowledging and incorporating epistemologies, topics, and methodologies from diverse regions, contexts, and backgrounds will enhance the comprehensiveness and relevance of their discipline and foster a more inclusive and meaningful understanding in communication studies.

Today, the neo-Anatolian pop music scene is thriving, and there is an abundance of reissues of Anatolian pop from the 1960s and 1970s. Sparked by U.S. hip-hop beat diggers in 2006, this trend has also led to a growing musicological interest in Anatolian pop and rock. This volume compiles over 15 years of research on Turkish music focusing on productions from Turkey and Germany. Key questions include the conditions that led to the emergence of Anatolian pop as a hybrid style and its relationship with other styles, such as arabesk, belly dance, folk, and hip-hop. The status of Turkish music in Germany is also examined, asking why this vast music production was ignored and excluded from the German music market and media for decades.

Interactive documentaries combine moving images, text, graphics, and digital interactions to create dynamic, web-based narrative formats. As a post-cinematographic expansion of the classical documentary film, they provide viewers with opportunities to select options and make decisions that co-determine what is shown and in what order. This volume brings together perspectives from film, media, game, and interface studies and includes analyses of key works as well as interviews with actors involved in making interactive documentaries. Key topics explored include opportunities for participating in interactive formats, challenges for the long-term archiving and accessibility of browser-based documentaries, and the influence of software and interfaces on the concept of the documentary.