Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced research. Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, New Media Futures captures the spirit and contributions of twenty-two women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. The editors and contributors give voice as creators integral to the development of these new media and place their works at the forefront of social change and artistic inquiry. What emerges is the dramatic story of how these Midwestern explorations in the digital arts produced a web of fascinating relationships. These fruitful collaborations helped usher in the digital age that propelled social media. Contributors: Carolina Cruz-Niera, Colleen Bushell, Nan Goggin, Mary Rasmussen, Dana Plepys, Maxine Brown, Martyl Langsdorf, Joan Truckenbrod, Barbara Sykes, Abina Manning, Annette Barbier, Margaret Dolinsky, Tiffany Holmes, Claudia Hart, Brenda Laurel, Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder, Sally Rosenthal, Lucy Petrovic, Donna J. Cox, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today's interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting 'old' or even 'dead' media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding 'new' media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

Puts forward a new, provocative history of queer cinema in Brazil. Through an analysis of contemporary Brazilian cinematic production,Cannibalizing Queer: Brazilian Cinema from 1970 to 2015 discusses which queer representations are erased and which are acknowledged in the complex processes of cultural translation, adaptation, and "devouring" that defines the Brazilian understanding of sexual dissidents and minorities. Joao Nemi Neto argues for Brazilian cinema studies to acknowledge the importance of 1920s modernism and of antropografia, a conceptual mode of cannibalism, to adopt and extrapolate a perverse form of absorption and raise the stakes on queer theory and postcolonialism, and to demonstrate how they are crucial to the development of a queer tradition in Brazilian cinema. In five chapters and two "trailers," Nemi Neto understands the term "queer" through its political dimensions because the films he analyzes represent characters that conform neither to American coming-out politics nor to Brazilian identity politics. Nonetheless, the films are queer precisely because the queer experiences and affection explored in these films do not necessarily insist on identifying characters as a particular sexuality or gender identity. Therefore, attention to characters within a unique cinematic world raises the stakes on several issues that hinge on cinematic form, narrative, and representation. Nemi Neto interviews and examines the work of Joao Silverio Trevisan and provides readings of films such as AIDS o furor do sexo explicito (AIDS the Furor of Explicit Sex, 1986), and Dzi Croquettes (2009) to theorize a productive overlap between queer and antropofagia. Moreover, the films analyzed here depict queer alternative representations to both homonormativity and heteronormativity as forms of resistance, at the same time as prejudice and heteronormativity remain present in contemporary Brazilian social practices. Graduate students and scholars of cinema and media studies, queer studies, Brazilian modernism, and Latin American studies will value what one early reader called "a point of departure for all future research on Brazilian queer cinema.

In The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz recalls Hollywood's Golden Age from the 1920s until the dawn of television in the late 1940s, when quality films were produced swiftly and cost efficiently thanks to the intricate design of the system. Schatz takes us through the rise and fall of individual careers and the making-and unmaking-of movies such as Frankenstein, Casablanca, and Hitchcock's Notorious. Through detailed analysis of major Hollywood moviemakers including Universal, Warner Bros., and MGM, he reminds us of a time when studios had distinct personalities and the relationship between contracts and creativity was not mutually exclusive.