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.

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.

Go behind the scenes of the Harry Potter film series with this compendium of stunning blueprints depicting spellbinding magical wizarding world locations from all eight films. Harry Potter: The Blueprints showcases the work of the artists who laid the foundation for the visually enchanting buildings, homes, rooms, and settings from all eight Harry Potter films. ICONIC LOCATIONS: 260 pages of stunningly detailed blueprints and in-depth commentary on creating the architecture of beloved Harry Potter buildings, homes, settings, and locations, including Hogwarts Castle, the Triwizard Tournament, Hogsmeade, and more. FILMMAKING SECRETS: Learn how Hogwarts and other locations in the wizarding world went from sketch to screen. DELUXE DETAILS: This generously sized volume beautifully showcases rare and unique sketches, notes, drafts, and photos.

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other "shadow libraries" and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb's commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today's gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cardenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cardenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cardenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monae's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cardenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

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

What was Takako Konishi really doing in North Dakota, and why did she end up dead? Did she get lost and freeze to death, as the police concluded, while searching for the fictional treasure buried in a snowbank at the end of the Coen Brothers' film Fargo? Or was it something else that brought her there: unrequited love, ritual suicide, a meteor shower, a far-flung search for purpose? The seed of an obsession took root in struggling film student Jana Larson when she chanced upon a news bulletin about the case. Over the years and across continents, the material Jana gathered in her search for the real Takako outgrew multiple attempts at screenplays and became this remarkable, genre-bending essay that leans into the space between fact and fiction, life and death, author and subject, reality and delusion.

Creating engaging and believable creature designs is a difficult and enjoyable task. The monsters, aliens and fantasy animals that grace our TV and cinema screens represent the hard work and dedication of a team of incredibly talented artists and designers. This book aims to unlock their world and introduce the fundamentals skills of creating movie quality designs. Covering key topics like animal anatomy and functionality as well as techniques to create unique and engaging designs, this expansive book will be packed full of advice and guidance from some of the most impressive and renowned artists working in this field in the world today.

A riveting chronicle of Communist Party efforts to propagate Communism in the United States, concurrent with Hollywood's "Golden Age" of creativity that came to define classical Hollywood cinema. From the Great Depression through World War II, the American Communist Party tried to take control of the motion picture industry. This comprehensive and chronological account of Communist influence in Hollywood surveys the topic from the Popular Front's fight against Fascism during the 1930s to the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the late 1940s. Birdnow, an established historian and chronicler of domestic Communism, outlines Communist International's organizational efforts promoting international communism, focusing on the work of Communist political activists such as Willi Munzenberg, a media mogul with an international network; Gerhart Eisler, patron of a Hollywood composer; and Otto Katz, a high-profile publicist of the party line involved in movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The book explores the covert ways in which Hollywood Communists and Soviet sympathizers attempted to tailor movie scripts to suit the Soviet agenda and discusses Communist front groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in great detail. Final chapters offer convincing proof that the directors, producers, and screenwriters blacklisted by studios for their possible Communist affiliations, known as the Hollywood Ten, were members of the Communist Party. Gives readers insight into how the Communist Party used the creative explosion in the movie industry to actively establish a foothold in the United States Draws a parallel between the rise of the Community Party and the rise of the motion picture industry in the United States Profiles Communist Party USA leaders close to Hollywood Takes a closer look at the "Hollywood Ten," detailing who each of the blacklisted individuals were and how their names came to be on the list

Unlike other books on architecture and film, Architecture Filmmaking investigates how the now-expanded field of architecture utilizes the practice of filmmaking (feature/short film, stop motion animation and documentary) or video/moving image in research, teaching and practice, and what the consequences of this interdisciplinary exchange are. While architecture and filmmaking have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs and filmmaking is a much younger art than architecture, the intersection between them is less defined. This book investigates the ways in which architectural researchers, teachers of architecture, their students and practising architects, filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice.

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.

In late November 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog received a phone call from Paris delivering some terrible news. German film historian, mentor, and close friend Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and dying. Herzog was determined to prevent this and believed that an act of walking would keep Eisner from death. He took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag of the barest essentials, and wearing a pair of new boots, set off on a three-week pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the deep chill and snowstorms of winter. Of Walking in Ice is Herzog's beautifully written, much-admired, yet often-overlooked diary account of that journey. Herzog documents everything he saw and felt on his quest to his friend's bedside, from poetic descriptions of the frozen landscape and harsh weather conditions to the necessity of finding shelter in vacant or abandoned houses and the intense loneliness of his solo excursion. Includes, for the first time, Werner Herzog's 1982 "Tribute to Lotte Eisner" upon her receipt of the Helmut Kautner Prize

Illustrator Pascal Campion shares his professional journey, galleries of work, and narrative-influenced tutorials, with charming art inspired by family life. It was after graduating in 2000 from the Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg, France, with a diploma in Narrative Illustration, Pascal's brother built him a computer. This was a new tool for Pascal and a digital artist was born. Roles in commercial art, animation, games, concept design, visual development and more have supplied Pascal with unique experience and skills to share with 3dtotal readers. He has freelanced for several prestigious clients on exciting projects. But it was his Sketch of the Day project (every morning, first thing, he creates a full-color sketch and story) that helped him to build his Instagram account. More than 860K fans follow Pascal's daily comic strip stories, with characters and stories inspired by his work and family life. This discipline combined with the ability to communicate with such relatable and charming spontaneity will fascinate readers. Pascal digs deep to pinpoint how his style and skills have evolved, helped by galleries of work past and present, including exclusives created just for this book. Tutorials with tips on storytelling, creating ambiance, and channelling personal experience will delight artists who want to pursue the storytelling side of their art.

From Melies to New Media contributes to a dynamic stream of film history that is just beginning to understand that new media forms are not only indebted to but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Adopting a media archaeology, this book will present a comparative examination of cinema including early film experiments with light and contemporary music videos, silent film and their digital restorations, German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema, French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake, Alfred Hitchcock's films exhibited in the gallery, post medium films as abstracted light forms and interactive digital screens revising experiments in precinema. Media archaeology is an approach that uncovers the potential of intermedial research as a fluid form of history. It envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalised contributions to history. It is also an approach that has been championed by influential new historicists like Thomas Elsaesser as providing the most vibrant and productive new histories (2014).

The Film Experience offers a comprehensive introduction to the art, language, industry, culture, and experience of the movies -with new digital tools to bring that experience to life and help students master course material. The text highlights how formal elements like cinematography, editing, and sound can be analyzed and interpreted within the context of a film as a whole. With superior tools for reading and writing about film, as well as unparalleled coverage of diversity, inclusion, and non-mainstream filmmaking traditions. The most robust introduction to film on the market, the Sixth Edition emphasizes film technology through expanded coverage of animation and a new Technology in Action feature, which puts the evolving technology of film in historical context. The Film Experience is also now available with LaunchPad, Macmillan's customizable online course space, which includes the full e-book, LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, a rich array of video activities aligned with the text, and more.

Voyage into a future where droids, hovering buildings, and space vehicles exist with Beginner's Guide to Drawing the Future - an accessible, entertaining introduction to creating science-fiction concepts with traditional tools. Packed with insightful tips, exciting tutorial projects, and essential art theory simply explained by industry professionals, this exciting volume is the perfect launch pad for your journey forward through time.

The Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation, and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave, hitting its stride with Trainspotting, and going global with The Full Monty, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Human Traffic, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead and This Is England, Britpop cinema pushed boundaries, paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe. Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg, Irvine Welsh, Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright, Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts, close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.