scholarly journals Will the Future Be Aquatic? Underwater Cartography, Verticality and Leonardo’s Submarine by Hito Steyerl

2021 ◽  
pp. 375-386
Author(s):  
Karolina Kolenda

This text explores the uses of water metaphors in the discourse of digital media on the example of Leonardo’s Submarine, a three-channel AI-generated video work by the artist and writer Hito Steyerl, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as its subsequent installation in a purposefully built virtual reality underwater gallery in winter 2020/2021. The two venues for staging the work are discussed in the context of Steyerl’s writings on the change of the European geographical imagination from the Renaissance up to the present day and the role played in this change by digital technologies. Steyerl’s ideas about the shift from the horizontal to vertical perspective and the present condition of groundlessness are “submerged” in a watery context of the ocean to test how verticality and groundlessness behave in an underwater environment. Drawing on selected concepts developed in the field of blue humanities, this text seeks to investigate Steyerl’s practice as an artist and new media theorist to show how it employs water metaphors to challenge rather than perpetuate our habitual thinking about the ocean and the media used to represent it.

Author(s):  
Maja Rudloff

<p>Over the past two decades, digital technologies have gained a greater and more important role in communication and dissemination of knowledge by museums. This article argues that the digitization of museum communication can be viewed as a result of a mediatization process that is connected to a cultural-political and museological focus on digital dissemination, in which user experience, interactivity, and participation are central concepts. The article argues that the different forms of communication, representation, and reception offered by digital media, together with the interactive and social possibilities for action they facilitate for their users, contribute to a transformation of the museum as an institution. It is concluded that the relationship between museum, collection, and users has undergone a number of changes caused by the intervention of the media and that the traditional social act of museum visiting has been transformed and somewhat adapted to new media-created forms of communication and action. From a more general perspective, the article may be regarded as a contribution to a continuous discussion of the role museums must play in a mediatized society.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 237 (10) ◽  
pp. 1172-1176
Author(s):  
Charlotte Schramm ◽  
Yaroslava Wenner

AbstractThe digital media becomes more and more common in our everyday lives. So it is not surprising that technical progress is also leaving its mark on amblyopia therapy. New media and technologies can be used both in the actual amblyopia therapy or therapy monitoring. In particular in this review shutter glasses, therapy monitoring and analysis using microsensors and newer video programs for amblyopia therapy are presented and critically discussed. Currently, these cannot yet replace classic amblyopia therapy. They represent interesting options that will occupy us even more in the future.


Author(s):  
Crispin Thurlow

This chapter focuses on sex/uality in the context of so-called new media and, specifically, digital discourse: technologically mediated linguistic or communicative practices, and mediatized representations of these practices. To help think through the relationship among sex, discourse, and (new) media, the discussion focuses on sexting and two instances of sexting “scandals” in the news. Against this backdrop, the chapter sets out four persistent binaries that typically shape public and academic writing about sex/uality and especially digital sex/uality: new-old, mediation-mediatization, private/real-public/fake, and personal-political. These either-or approaches are problematic, because they no longer account for the practical realities and lived experiences of both sex and media. Scholars interested in digital sex/uality are advised to adopt a “both-and” approach in which media (i.e., digital technologies and The Media) both create pleasurable, potentially liberating opportunities to use our bodies (sexually or otherwise) and simultaneously thwart us, shame us, or shut us down. In this sense, there is nothing that is really “new” after all.


Author(s):  
David Philip Green ◽  
Mandy Rose ◽  
Chris Bevan ◽  
Harry Farmer ◽  
Kirsten Cater ◽  
...  

Consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets (e.g. Oculus Go) have brought VR non-fiction (VRNF) within reach of at-home audiences. However, despite increase in VR hardware sales and enthusiasm for the platform among niche audiences at festivals, mainstream audience interest in VRNF is not yet proven. This is despite a growing body of critically acclaimed VRNF, some of which is freely available. In seeking to understand a lack of engagement with VRNF by mainstream audiences, we need to be aware of challenges relating to the discovery of content and bear in mind the cost, inaccessibility and known limitations of consumer VR technology. However, we also need to set these issues within the context of the wider relationships between technology, society and the media, which have influenced the uptake of new media technologies in the past. To address this work, this article provides accounts by members of the public of their responses to VRNF as experienced within their households. We present an empirical study – one of the first of its kind – exploring these questions through qualitative research facilitating diverse households to experience VRNF at home, over several months. We find considerable enthusiasm for VR as a platform for non-fiction, but we also find this enthusiasm tempered by ethical concerns relating to both the platform and the content, and a pervasive tension between the platform and the home setting. Reflecting on our findings, we suggest that VRNF currently fails to meet any ‘supervening social necessity’ (Winston, 1996, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. British: BFI.) that would pave the way for widespread domestic uptake, and we reflect on future directions for VR in the home.


Author(s):  
محسن عبود كشكول

The importance of media education in our present time lies in its supposed role in rationalizing the youth’s use of digital media, as the school is no longer able to continue its knowledge and educational pioneering role in light of the excessive and absurd use of the Internet, just as the teacher is no longer a main source of science and knowledge. Considering the study curricula, addressing the negative impact of the excessive use of digital media on the school, as well as addressing the decline in the role of the family and its withdrawal from educational competition with the school, and thus education has lost the mandate of the school and the family to educate the new generation in favor of the hegemony of the new media authority, which is called metaphorically. Fifth, which overtook all authorities, including the authority of traditional media (the fourth power), so that control over the child went beyond control of his family and parents, and the challenge became before those concerned with education, how can the new media be a source of education, entertainment, education, guidance and direction, and in various methods of influence, By using multiple and amazing techniques that are characterized by transcending the limits of time and space, and according to that the great impact of the new media, we see a decline in public education. Illiteracy and its limited means, as well as retreating and losing its control over the social environment, which calls on researchers to study ways to rationalize media education, enhance human awareness of the media, and give it the largest share in influence and direction, and in social upbringing and raising young and old together.


Author(s):  
Khoerul Umam

The spread of digital media on the internet was very broad, fast, and cannot be monitored in a structured manner about what media has been uploaded and distributed on the internet network. The spread of digital media like this was very difficult to detect whether the media that shared was privately owned or that of others that is re-shared by media theft or digital media piracy. One step to overcome the theft of digital works is to give them a watermark, which is an identity that is placed on top of the work. However, this is still considered unsafe because the identity attached can be cut and manipulated again until it is not visible. In addition, the use of Steganography method to hide messages in an image can still be manipulated by adding messages continuously so that it accumulates and damages the original owner of the image. In this article, the author provides a solution called Digital Watermarking, a step of encrypting the data of the original owner of the work and putting it into the image of his work. This watermark cannot be seen clearly, but actually in the media there is encrypted data with a strong Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) method. As a result, a tool that can improve the security of media owner data by combining the AES and Steganogaphy methods in the formation of new media that cannot be changed anymore. So, when the media is stolen and used by others and has been edited, the owner's personal data can never be changed.


Author(s):  
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

This chapter examines ghostly gestures that we cannot consciously experience, but only perceive through digital technologies. Internationally recognized as a leading video artist, Viola’s work focuses on the intersections of new media and experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality, and emotion. Many of his recent installations manipulate our sense of time by using a special high-speed camera. Uncanny gestures (those that are embodied but unreadable) emerge as the film is transferred to digital video and slowed down. The emergence of gestures that we can recognize once visualized through digital media as our own, but we cannot recall – that is, we cannot reenact or remember – points to something uncanny about gesture and its relation to affect. Rather than offering us a new understanding of human interiority or an opportunity to make sense of the uncanny, Viola’s work leaves us only with uncertainty as a visceral affect.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Janet H. Murray

With the advent of mass consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets and controllers in the second decade of the 20th century, some experts have predicted we are on a path toward losing the distinction between the real and the virtual. These predictions overstate the empirical evidence for the effects of VR; ignore its technical limitations; take for granted highly speculative claims about the nature of consciousness; and, most fundamentally, lose sight of the continuities between VR and other representational media. This article argues against thinking of VR as a magical technology for creating seamless illusions. Instead it situates VR as an emerging medium within an evolving community that is beginning to develop the media conventions to support sustained interaction and immersion. The future of VR is not an inevitable and delusional metaverse but a medium of representation that will always require our active creation of belief.


Author(s):  
Dal Yong Jin

Political economy of the media includes several domains including journalism, broadcasting, advertising, and information and communication technology. A political economy approach analyzes the power relationships between politics, mediation, and economics. First, there is a need to identify the intellectual history of the field, focusing on the establishment and growth of the political economy of media as an academic field. Second is the discussion of the epistemology of the field by emphasizing several major characteristics that differentiate it from other approaches within media and communication research. Third, there needs an understanding of the regulations affecting information and communication technologies (ICTs) and/or the digital media-driven communication environment, especially charting the beginnings of political economy studies of media within the culture industry. In particular, what are the ways political economists develop and use political economy in digital media and the new media milieu driven by platform technologies in the three new areas of digital platforms, big data, and digital labor. These areas are crucial for analysis not only because they are intricately connected, but also because they have become massive, major parts of modern capitalism.


Author(s):  
Christian Pentzold ◽  
Anne Kaun ◽  
Christine Lohmeier

In our fast-forward times, the special issue ‘Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies’ examines the future-making capacity of networked services and digital data. Its contributions ask about the role media play in forecasting the future and their part in bringing it about. And they are interested in the expectations and anticipatory visions that accompany the formation and spread of new media. Along these lines, the eight articles in this special issue explore the future-making dimension of new media. As a whole, they provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways media reconfigure the relations and distances among present, past, and future times. The contributions delineate imaginaries of futures related to digital media. Furthermore, they attend to interventions into the plans and efforts of making futures and they inquire about the creation of differently vast and (un)certain horizons of expectation. Together, the articles share the assumption that mediated futures are actively accomplished and enacted; they do not simply appear or wait for us to arrive in them.


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