Seeing the Apocalypse: Essays on Bird Box is the first volume to explore Josh Malerman's best-selling novel and its recent film adaptation, which broke streaming records and became a cultural touchstone, emerging as a staple in the genre of contemporary horror. The essays in this collection offer an interdisciplinary approach to Bird Box, one that draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, and disability studies. The contributors examine how Bird Box provokes questions about a range of issues including the human body and its existence in the world, the ethical obligations that shape community, and the anxieties arising from technological development. Taken together, the essays of this volume show how a critical examination of Bird Box offers readers a guide for thinking through human experience in our own troubled, apocalyptic times.

The ubiquity of digital images has profoundly changed the responsibilities and capabilities of anyone and everyone who uses them. Thanks to a range of innovations, from the convergence of moving and still image in the latest DSLR cameras to the growing potential of interactive and online photographic work, the lens and screen have emerged as central tools for many artists. Vision Anew brings together a diverse selection of texts by practitioners, critics, and scholars to explore the evolving nature of the lens-based arts. Presenting essays on photography and the moving image alongside engaging interviews with artists and filmmakers, Vision Anew offers an inspired assessment of the medium's ongoing importance in the digital era. Contributors include: Ai Weiwei, Gerry Badger, David Campany, Lev Manovich, Christian Marclay, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Murch, Trevor Paglen, Pipilotti Rist, Shelly Silver, Rebecca Solnit, and Alec Soth, among others. This vital collection is essential reading for artists, educators, scholars, critics and curators, and anyone who is passionate about the lens-based arts.

Hans P. Bacher is acknowledged as one of the greats of production design for animation, He has been given access to Disney's archives to uncover eye-popping examples of both his own work and that of his colleagues. Featured are illustrations from 'Bambi', 'Mulan', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'Brother Bear' and many more.

Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen, showing a master still at work - even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage.

Based on the omnipresent term 'Industry 4.0', the publication #material4.0 reflects the interplay between the virtual world and the physical-real space. As part of the exhibition at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, 13 international artists, mostly 'digital natives', examine how computer dependent automation and digitalisation are reflected in an art context. How does art output change from production to the aesthetic? How is this kind of media used in posing artistic questions? The positions of digital art pioneers fill us in. The publication documents the exhibition with numerous illustrations of works and a collection of complementary texts. Artists: Christian von Borries, Kate Cooper, JAK, Kanta Kimura, Mathilde Lavenne, Jung Lee, Florian Model, Manfred Mohr, Marco Schmitt, Lidia Sigle, Adam Slowik, Ivar Veermae, Ryszard Winiarski. With contributions by Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake and Peter Weibel. Exhibition at the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen (DE), 6 October 2018 - 3 March 2019. Text in English and German.

A History of Video Art is a revised and expanded edition of the 2006 original, which extends the scope of the first edition, incorporating a wider range of artists and works from across the globe and explores and examines developments in the genre of artists' video from the mid 1990s up to the present day. In addition, the new edition expands and updates the discussion of theoretical concepts and ideas which underpin contemporary artists' video. Tracking the changing forms of video art in relation to the revolution in electronic and digital imaging that has taken place during the last 50 years, A History of Video Art orients video art in the wider art historical context, with particular reference to the shift from the structuralism of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the post-modernist concerns of the 1980s and early 1990s. The new edition also explores the implications of the internationalisation of artists' video in the period leading up to the new millennium and its concerns and preoccupations including post-colonialism, the post-medium condition and the impact and influence of the internet.

The first analysis of the relationship between art and video games, from the sixties until today. Art and play: how many forms does this relationship take? Duchamp used to say that art was a game and that games were art. When video games joined the dance of the muses this relationship was further enriched. Video games are an art and in recent years they have had a crucial influence on other arts: cinema, literature, music and visual arts. They stand at the crossroads between very diverse forms of culture and product, and it is precisely the anomaly inherent in this encounter/clash that makes them so terribly interesting. Neoludica is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between art and video games, and it underlines how the video game (an interactive multimedia work) is an art form that has yet to be understood by the world of culture. The interactive dimension is a facet that has attracted art since the advent of environmental installations during the sixties, and it is a dimension that has since been developed in digital art through video installations. The video game/art contamination occurs not only on the aesthetic level, but also through those elements of language which can be defined as conceptual, such as interactivity mentioned above. Naturally, it acquires an artistic dimension when its aims go beyond mere technical prowess and explore the world of fantasy.

Perhaps best known for Rebel without a Cause, American filmmaker Nicholas Ray directed dozens of movies in the film noir genre, including In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and They Live by Night. Born in Galesville, Wisconsin, in 1911, Ray was an iconoclastic figure in film-an alcoholic, depressive, and compulsive gambler-who found himself increasingly blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1960s only to be heralded as the spiritual father to American cinema's New Wave and one of America's greatest rebel auteurs. From Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch, Ray's influence can be seen throughout the work of some of the twentieth century's greatest directors. In this authoritative biography, Bernard Eisenschitz leaves no stone unturned.

"Database Aesthetics" examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.
Contributors: Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.
Victoria Vesna is a media artist, and professor and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

(Bilingual edition: English / German) Between light and shadow Liddy Scheffknecht is one of Austria's most experimental young visual artists. The publication Liddy Scheffknecht - Points in Time presents selected works from the past decade (2010-2020). Liddy Scheffknecht's work encompasses a broad spectrum of media, yet forms a coherent, ongoing artistic program. In photographic sequences, installations, sculptures, drawings, and media hybrids, the artist explores the relationship between temporality, perception, and space; in doing so, she creates and ruptures illusions in equal measure. Liddy Scheffknecht's artistic works use immaterial media such as sunlight and shadow as well as classical sculptural materials and digital media.

Many believe Max Steiner's score for "King Kong" (1933) was the first important attempt at integrating background music into sound film, but a closer look at the industry's early sound era (1926--1934) reveals a more extended and fascinating story. Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in Hollywood's initial development, recasting the history of film sound and its relationship to the "Golden Age" of film music (1935--1950).

Slowik follows filmmakers' shifting combinations of sound and image, recapturing the volatility of this era and the variety of film music strategies that were tested, abandoned, and kept. He explores early film music experiments and accompaniment practices in opera, melodrama, musicals, radio, and silent films and discusses the impact of the advent of synchronized dialogue. He concludes with a reassessment of "King Kong" and its groundbreaking approach to film music, challenging the film's place and importance in the timeline of sound achievement.

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition, looking at how they adapted the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serial visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces the relationship of film serials to the broadcast models of radio and television and thereby shows how film serials introduced modes of storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise.

Images can be studied in many ways-as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive-they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work, one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents-human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual-become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't always describe.

Barbis Ruder: 10 Jahre Performancekunst Im Fokus der Arbeiten der Performance- und Medienkunstlerin Barbis Ruder steht der Koerper - als Ausgangs- und Untersuchungsobjekt zugleich. In ihren Performances und multimedialen Arbeiten lotet Ruder Themen wie Wirtschaft, Arbeit, Intimitat und Konventionen aus. Der Koerper kommt im bewegten Bild, in Skulpturen, Installationen und auf der Buhne zum Einsatz. Das Buch prasentiert erstmals das gesamte Werk von Barbis Ruder und zeigt die Vielschichtigkeit ihres Schaffens. In unterschiedlichen Werkzyklen wird der Koerper immer wieder neu ver- und behandelt, im Spannungsfeld zwischen Emanzipation und Kapitalismus. Die umfangreiche Werkschau versammelt trashige Buhnenperformances und bildhauerische Werke ebenso wie Videoarbeiten und gibt Einblicke in Werkentwicklungen, die durch Zeichnungen und Studien dokumentiert sind. Erstes umfassendes Werkportrat der Performance- und Medienkunstlerin Barbis Ruder Aufwendig gestaltetes Buchobjekt, mit zahlreichen grossformatigen Abbildungen Mit Beitragen von Lona Gaikis und Peter Kozek sowie einer Einleitung von Madeleine Frey

This volume presents an original framework for the study of video games that use visual materials and narrative conventions from ancient Greece and Rome. It focuses on the culturally rich continuum of ancient Greek and Roman games, treating them not just as representations, but as functional interactive products that require the player to interpret, communicate with and alter them. Tracking the movement of such concepts across different media, the study builds an interconnected picture of antiquity in video games within a wider transmedial environment. Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames presents a wide array of games from several different genres, ranging from the blood-spilling violence of god-killing and gladiatorial combat to meticulous strategizing over virtual Roman Empires and often bizarre adventures in pseudo-ancient places. Readers encounter instances in which players become intimately engaged with the "epic mode" of spectacle in God of War, moments of negotiation with colonised lands in Rome: Total War and Imperium Romanum, and multi-layered narratives rich with ancient traditions in games such as Eleusis and Salammbo. The case study approach draws on close analysis of outstanding examples of the genre to uncover how both representation and gameplay function in such "ancient games".