The Poetics of Radical Hope: The Abderrhamane Sissako Experience communicates pieces of evidence that Sissako is the most talented and the most sophisticated filmmaker of his generation. This imaginative excellence emanates from new aspirations to fashion an original African cinematic aesthetic for a politic of radical hope and creative adaptation. Sissako's contribution extends to all aspects of the indigenous motion pictures industry to help rebuild the continent's cultural infrastructures and create intellectual and cultural spaces to mobilize narrative strategies to contribute in the making of potent African collectives. Far from being abstract, Sissako's logic of contribution resists facile reading and demands a direct and profound engagement with the text. Sissako is one of the best filmmakers working today because his cinema constitutes a generative contribution to the contemporary production of African intelligibility. This logic of contribution helps to better articulate the historical logics and practices of a continent in constant throes of situational emergencies. The cinemas confront African colonial legacies to contemporary globalization discourses that grip the contemporary global condition, notably: political instability, poverty, illiteracy, digital divide, global warming and food shortages, diseases and the so-called "clash of civilization."

Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen. For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? Girl Head explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. The book develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. This original work of feminist media history shows how gender has had a persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.

Learn about key elements of character art from traditional and digital illustrator, Simone Grunewald. Simone, also known as "Schmoe", creates heart-felt and personal designs inspired by her everyday life experiences and passion for the arts. As a new mother, she also draws on her humorous experiences of bringing up a small child in the modern world. Discover in-depth visual breakdowns of Simone's techniques as well as a varied and extensive collection of Simone's stunning art. From linework advice to character design considerations, Simone generously shares her creative practice. A book that appeals to artists at every stage of their creative journey, this title teaches how to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls, as well as how to improve technique. Feel motivated to practice every day to develop engaging characters of all shapes, ages and sizes. With special focus on developing dynamic poses and expressions, Simone's advice will ensure that you create emotive characters with energy and personality.

Is art created with computers really art? This book answers 'yes.' Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art's historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.

From gaming consoles to smartphones, video games are everywhere today, including those set in historical times and particularly in the ancient world. This volume explores the varied depictions of the ancient world in video games and demonstrates the potential challenges of games for scholars as well as the applications of game engines for educational and academic purposes. With successful series such as "Assassin's Creed" or "Civilization" selling millions of copies, video games rival even television and cinema in their role in shaping younger audiences' perceptions of the past. Yet classical scholarship, though embracing other popular media as areas of research, has so far largely ignored video games as a vehicle of classical reception. This collection of essays fills this gap with a dedicated study of receptions, remediations and representations of Classical Antiquity across all electronic gaming platforms and genres. It presents cutting-edge research in classics and classical receptions, game studies and archaeogaming, adopting different perspectives and combining papers from scholars, gamers, game developers and historical consultants. In doing so, it delivers the first state-of-the-art account of both the wide array of 'ancient' video games, as well as the challenges and rewards of this new and exciting field.

In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning-which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming-provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnes Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.

Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In "Recording Reality, Desiring the Real," Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating.
Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, she asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, Cowie examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," John Huston's "Let There Be Light," and Milica Tomic's "Portrait of My Mother.""
Recording Reality, Desiring the Real "stakes documentary's central place in cinema as both an art form and a form of social engagement, which together create a new understanding of spectatorship.

Character Design Quarterly (CDQ) is a lively, creative magazine bringing inspiration, expert insights, and leading techniques from professional illustrators, artists, and character art enthusiasts worldwide. Each issue provides detailed tutorials on creating diverse characters, enabling you to explore the processes and decision making that go into creating amazing characters. Learn new ways to develop your own ideas, and discover from the artists what it is like to work for prolific animation studios such as Disney, Warner Bros., and DreamWorks. The cover of issue 18 comes from animation character designer and art director Max Ulichney, who creates fun, production-worthy characters, and scenes with bold cinematography at the forefront. Also in this awesome issue, we speak to the directors of Panimation Studio and learn how to redesign classic characters with hugely popular artist Marta Garci a Navarro.

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1960s and onwards challenged the concept of art - hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures - manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history's most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices. By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

Digital Currents explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator.

Margot Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making - video, computer, the internet - in this richly illustrated book. She provides a context for the works of major artists in each media, describes their projects, and discusses the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field.
Digital Currents fills a major gap in our understanding of the relationship between art and technology, and the exciting new cultural conditions we are experiencing. It will be ideal reading for students taking courses in digital art, and also for anyone seeking to understand these new creative forms.

Immerse yourself in the world of Denis Villeneuve's Dune and discover the incredible creative journey that brought Frank Herbert's iconic novel to the big screen. Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune has been brought to life like never before in the breathtaking film adaptation from acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Arrival). Now fans can be part of this creative journey with The Art and Soul of Dune, the official companion to the hugely anticipated movie event. Written by Dune executive producer Tanya Lapointe, this visually dazzling exploration of the filmmaking process gives unparalleled insight into the project's genesis--from its striking environmental and creature designs to its intricate costume concepts and landmark digital effects. The Art and Soul of Dune also features exclusive interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Denis Villeneuve, Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, and many more, delivering a uniquely candid account of the hugely ambitious international shoot. Showcasing Villeneuve's visionary approach to realizing Herbert's science fiction classic, The Art and Soul of Dune is an essential companion to the director's latest masterpiece.

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics-one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens-or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country s second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation."

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in 1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinema et de la television de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These "Nollywood" films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes. Contributors: Ralph A. Austen and Mahir Saul, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Birgit Meyer, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, Vincent Bouchard, Laura Fair, Jane Bryce, Peter Rist, Stefan Sereda, Lindsey Green-Simms, and Cornelius Moore

Electronic art offers endless opportunities for reflection and interpretation. Works can be interactive or entirely autonomous and the viewer's perception and reaction to them may be challenged by constantly transforming images. Whether the transformations are a product of the appearances or actions of a viewer in an installation space, or a product of a self-contained computer program, is a source of constant fascination. Some viewers may feel strange or unnerved by a work, while others may feel welcoming, humorous, and playful emotions. The art may also provoke a critical response to social, aesthetic, and political aspects of early twenty-first-century life. This book approaches electronic art through the teachings of Jacques Lacan, whose return to Freud has exerted a powerful and wide-ranging influence on psychoanalysis and critical theory in the twentieth century. David Bard-Schwarz draws on his experience with Lacanian psychoanalysis, music, and interactive and traditional arts in order to address aspects of the works the viewer may find difficult to understand. Dividing his approach over four thematic chapters-Bodies, Voices, Eyes, and Signifiers-Bard-Schwarz explores the links between works of new media and psychoanalysis (how we process what we see, hear, touch, imagine, and remember). This is a fascinating book for new media artists and critics, museum curators, psychologists, students in the fine arts, and those who are interested in digital technology and contemporary culture.

Electronic art offers endless opportunities for reflection and interpretation. Some works are either interactive or entirely autonomous, and the viewer's perception and reaction to them may be challenged by constantly transforming images. Whether the transformations are a product of the appearances or actions of a viewer in an installation space, or a product of a self-contained computer program, is a source of constant fascination. Some viewers may feel strange or unnerved by a work, while others may feel welcoming, humorous, and playful emotions. The art may also provoke a critical response to social, aesthetic, and political aspects of early twenty-first century life. This book approaches electronic art through the teachings of Jacques Lacan, whose return to Freud has exerted a powerful and wide-ranging influence on psychoanalysis and critical theory in the twentieth century. An Introduction to Electronic Art through the Teaching of Jacques Lacan brings together New Media works of art and Lacanian psychoanalysis. David Schwarz draws on his experience with Lacanian psychoanalysis, music, interactive and traditional arts in order to address aspects of the works the viewer may find difficult to understand. Dividing his approach over four thematic chapters - Bodies, Voices, Eyes and Signifiers - Schwarz explores the links between works of New Media and psychoanalysis (how we process what we see, hear, touch, imagine, and remember). This is a fascinating book for New Media artists and critics, museum curators, psychologists, students in the fine arts and those who are interested in digital technology and contemporary culture.

A personal and expert account of the artists and events that defined the medium's first 50 years, written a true expert in the field 'London's book excites because it brings new artists into a lineage worthy of greater stuff. Her passion for lesser-known figures ... is contagious.' - ARTnews, The Best Art Books of 2020 Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. This first-hand account by the curator who has been following video art from its beginnings in the late 1960s, when artists first adapted portable consumer technology to art-making, spotlights video's ongoing importance in the art world, tracing the genre's development alongside the advances in technology that have continued to open up new possibilities for artists. London has worked closely and personally with the artists she writes about, who span generations, including Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Pipilotti Rist, Miranda July, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Ian Cheng. The text is both art-historical and personal - weaving together background information and insightful interpretations with unique anecdotes and experiences to trace the history of video art as it transformed into the broader field of media art - from analog to digital, small TV monitors to wall-scale projections, and clunky hardware to user-friendly software. In doing this, she reveals how video evolved from fringe status to be seen as one of the foremost art forms of today.

Meet some of the finest 2D and 3D artists working in the industry today and discover how they create some of the most innovative digital art in the world. More than a gallery book or a coffee table book- Digital Art Masters Volume 5 includes over 50 artists and 900 unique and stunning 2D and 3D digital art. Beyond the breath taking images is a breakdown of the techniques, challenges and tricks the artists employed while creating stunning imagery. This volume, much like the previous volumes is not your standard coffee table book nor is it our usual how-to-book. New to this volume will be 5 artist video tutorials. Five artists will specifically detail an aspect of their gallery image from start to finish, offering further technique driven insight and expertise offering 2 1/2 hours of additional inspiration. With a click of a mouse, artists willbe able to apply the leading techniques to their own work with access to additional video tutorials, source files, textures and digital brushes at the companion website: http: //www.focalpress.com/digital-art-masters/index.html.

The Art of Eliza Ivanova is an evocative, edgy, and beautiful book filled with the work of this exciting artist. A graduate of the California Institute of Arts, Bulgarian-born Eliza now lives in San Francisco where she created much of the art on these pages. She produces effortless movement with her sketched lines and animation-influenced dynamic touches. Well known for her portraits and figures of women and children, Eliza's style is distinctive and rich in detail. In addition to a gallery filled with a mix of old favorites, new creations and bespoke commissions for this book, you will be invited into Eliza's world. Enter her studio to discover her workspace and favorite tools. Eliza also shares techniques with us in step-by-step workshops to help us capture some of that dynamic movement that infuses her work. Both aspiring and established artists will benefit from Eliza's technical tips and words of wisdom about life, work, and more.

Contributors to this issue examine the role of video games in American culture, approaching games through the lenses of transpacific studies, queer historiography, cultural history, critical race and ethnic studies, and border studies. They explore interactions between the United States and Asia through the genre of visual novels; investigate representations of the AIDS crisis in video game history; consider how games like Papers, Please address concepts of borders and national belonging; and show the aesthetic and political challenges that games like Assassin's Creed III face in telling counterhistories of marginalized peoples. Taken together, these essays show how games can contribute to an expanded understanding of the United States and of the ways that cultural forms circulate nationally and transnationally. Contributors. Patrick Jagoda, Stephen Joyce, Gary Kafer, Jennifer Malkowski, Katrina Marks, Josef Nguyen, Christopher B. Patterson, Bo Ruberg, Arthur Z. Wang

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as 'meaning', 'form' or 'expression' apply to computer art?

A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as 'interactivity' and 'user'.

Drawing on a wealth of examples he also explains how the roles of the computer artist and computer art user distinguishes them from makers and spectators of traditional art forms and argues that computer art allows us to understand better the role of technology as an art medium.

An in-depth look into the transformation of visual culture and digital aesthetics   First introduced by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the term operational images defines the expanding field of machine vision. In this study, media theorist Jussi Parikka develops Farocki’s initial concept by considering the extent to which operational images have pervaded today’s visual culture, outlining how data technologies continue to develop and disrupt our understanding of images beyond representation. Charting the ways that operational images have been employed throughout a variety of fields and historical epochs, Parikka details their many roles as technologies of analysis, capture, measurement, diagramming, laboring, (machine) learning, identification, tracking, and destruction. He demonstrates how, though inextricable from issues of power and control, operational images extend their reach far beyond militaristic and colonial violence and into the realms of artificial intelligence, data, and numerous aspects of art, media, and everyday visual culture. Serving as an extensive guide to a key concept in contemporary art, design, and media theory, Operational Images explores the implications of machine vision and the limits of human agency. Through a wealth of case studies highlighting the areas where imagery and data intersect, this book gives us unprecedented insight into the ever-evolving world of posthuman visuality. Cover alt text: Satellite photo on which white title words appear in yellow boxes. Yellow lines connect the boxes.