Full Description
We're experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists' close readings of contemporary media with scientists' discussions of the science and math that inform them.
This text includes contributions by established and emerging scholars performing across-the-aisle research on new technologies, exploring topics such as facial and gait recognition; EEG and audiovisual materials; surveillance; and sound and images in relation to questions of sexual identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and class and includes examples from a range of films and TV shows including Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Morgan, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Through a variety of critical, theoretical, proprioceptive, and speculative lenses, the collection facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration and provides readers with ways of responding to these new technologies.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis
Part I: AI and Robotics
1. Could the AI of Our Dreams Ever Become Reality?
Jay McClelland
2. Director Alex Garland Converses with Cybermedia's Scientists and Media Scholars
Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis
3. (S)Ex Machina and the Cartesian Theater of the Absurd
Simon D. Levy and Charles W. Lowney
4. Epiphany, Infinity and Transcendent AI
Zachary Mason
Part II: Big Data, Sentience, and the Universe
5. A MASSIVE Swirl of Pixels: Algorithms in Radiohead's 'Go to Sleep'
Steen Ledet Christiansen
6. The Rise of the Machine: Body-Knowing, Neural Nets, and Emergent Freedom
Charles W. Lowney
7. The Quantum Computer as Sci-Fi's Favorite Character
Leonardo P. G. De Assis
8. Composer Ben Salisbury Discusses Scoring Science for Alex Garland
Holly Rogers, John McGrath, Carol Vernallis, and Dale Chapman
9. Ex Machina and the Question of Consciousness
Murray Shanahan
Part III: The Neuroscience of Affect and Event Perception
10. 'A Solid Popularity Arc': Affective Economies in Black Mirror's 'Nosedive'
Dale Chapman
11. Cognitive Boundaries, 'Nosedive' and Under the Skin: Interview with Jeffrey Zacks
Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, and Dale Chapman
12. Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective Approach
Frederick Aldama and Laura Wagner
Part IV: The Digital West
13. The Philosophy of Westworld
Paul Skokowski
14. New Visions of the Old West: A.I., Self, and Other in Westworld
Christopher Minz
15. Scoring Music for Westworld Then and Now: A Cognitive Perspective
Annabel J. Cohen
Part V: Interface, Desire, Collectivity
16. Director Terence Nance Discusses Random Acts of Flyness
Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Holly Rogers, Liz Reich and the contributors of Cybermedia
17. The Gift of Black Sonics: Interface and Ontology in Sorry to Bother You and Random Acts of Flyness
Liz Reich
18. Technology, Chaos, and the Nimble Subversion of Random Acts of Flyness
Eric Lyon
19. Expecting the Twist: How Media Navigate the Intersections Among Different Sources of Prior Knowledge
Noah Fram
20. Face Color
Bevil Conway
Part VI: Productive Neuropathologies
21. Digital Vitalism
Marta Figlerowicz
22. Neuroplasticity: From Experience to Healing
Sara Ferrando Colomer
23. Where is My Mind? Mr. Robot and the Digital Neuropolis
Patricia Pisters
24. Dopamine Circuits: Wanting, Liking, Habits, and Goals. An Interview about Mr. Robot with Neuroscientist Talia Lerner
Jonathan Leal, Carol Vernallis, and Patricia Pisters
25. The Taste of Cybermedia: An Interview with Hojoon Lee, The Lee Lab at Northwestern University
Julia Peres Guimaraes, Selmin Kara, and Carol Vernallis
Index
