School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Processing
    Cubitt, S ( 2017)
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    NASA’s Voyager Fly-by Animations’
    Cubitt, S ; Harris, M ; Husbands, L ; Taberham, P (Routledge, 2019-02-14)
    Analysis of the animations produced by James Blinn and Alvy Ray Smith for the Voyager missions, including consideration of the Golden Dscs, as examples of 'psthumous' media, designed for consumption y alien species after the demise of our own.
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    Ecocritique
    Cubitt, S (University of California Press, 2019)
    Every enterprise needs to start with a careful consideration of its tools and materials. In our case, that means looking carefully at the words media and environment and the conjunction between them. Environment presumes something that environs and something environed. It seems safe to presume that the only ones talking about environing are human and that the environment is the nonhuman that surrounds them. For the last two hundred years, humans have inhabited two environments, the natural world and the factory, and now we are entering a third, the information environment. Scholars use the word environment to help distinguish the science of ecology from the social construction of environment, but at the cost of demeaning the very thing they most want to value. Ecocritique is a way of thinking these concerns critically, by placing them in crisis, at a decisive moment, as in the crisis of a disease at the turning point between recovery and terminal decline.
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    Ecocritique as transnational commons
    Cubitt, S (Taylor & Francis, 2019)
    The term 'transnational' can be read in two simultaneous dimensions: as ontological description of a primordially queer birthing (trans + natio) and as a trajectory of practice engaging with the historical actuality of borders. Ecocritique is centrally transnational in both senses, and ecomedia are privileged vehicles for conflictual practices of friction and suture acting along the line of alienation dividing and binding the two dimensions. This is a fundamental fracture between those who govern – some but only some humans – and those who in varying degrees or absolutely are ruled with limited access or none to the work of ruling. The paper proposes an ecocritical aesthetic politics operating through mediation and communication to produce a commons engaging excluded ecologies and technologies in the co-production of a new political space.
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    Untimely ripped (against the mass image)
    Cubitt, S (Intellect, 2016-06-01)
    Abstract I take the Aristotelean view that the question for ethics is ‘How should I live?’ and the question for politics is ‘How are we supposed to live?’ Aristotle’s next step was to argue that in both instances, these are questions about the good life. These are fundamentally aesthetic questions. So let me advance as a hypothesis that the reason for doing any of the art, science and critique we undertake is happiness. The world we have is unhappy, so happiness depends on negating what is given to us as the world. That is what images do: they negate the world in order to produce pictures that are more startling, richer, surer, more filled with meaning and more desirable than what we have to inhabit. Even images of unhappy events attempt to heal them. An image aspires to happiness. The proliferation of images is a different matter.
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    Sichtbare Zeit
    Cubitt, S ; Holl, U ; Kaldrack, I ; Miksch, C ; Stutz, E ; Welinder, E (Willhelm Fink Verlag, 2018)
    Discussion [in German] on the raw material of time in moving image media through analyses of video art works by Robert Cahen, Rosa Menckman and David Rokeby.
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    A Short History of Hate
    Cubitt, S (Abramis Academic, 2017)
    This article analyses how the theme of hate depicted in Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has been transformed in representations – from the BBC’s live television production by Nigel Kneale and Rudolf Cartier, in 1954, to Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple computers in 1984. It goes on to consider the significance of artist Terry Flaxton’s video that was shot separately on the set and the meanings to be drawn from the interviews with east London skinheads who took part in the group-hate scene. The article argues that Orwell’s dystopian vision offers an inspiration for understanding how the nature of hate has changed from individual performance in community assemblies and mass rallies to what might be defined as an ‘aggregation of behaviours’. The hate of today is not to be found on television, in advertising campaigns or festival documentaries but in Twitter storms and social media bullying.
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    Three Geomedia
    Cubitt, S (Ctrl-Z, 2017)
    Working on the same principles as the phonograph, but reading tremblings of the ground rather than of the air, scratching out in real time invisible actions in visible form, the seismograph betrays its origins in the mechanical era. Today a second, more arithmetic form of data visualisation diagrams a numerical data set such as the one derived from instrument systems in place to monitor the health of the Animas River. A third form, financial visualisation software in commodity markets, not only gives direct accounts of geology (reserves), human interventions in them (extraction) and simulations of their likely use (futures) but actively produce those futures by fixing future trading prices. These three geomedia—vectoral analogues, numerical translations, and direct data—have significantly different means for handling time, with implications for the increasingly punctual subjects they presume, to the extent that it is not at all clear that the subjectivities they address, enable or create are human.
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    What Is A Journal For?
    Cubitt, S (Open Journal Systems, 2017)
    A journal needs a project: to survive, to thrive, to matter. Open Access (OA) journals need a project more than any other. OA has yet to develop a business model that will pay for the toil of editors, copy-editors, designers and content managers. Freelance authors have to prefer paying gigs; and academic authors, whose wages pay for the time to write, are under pressure to publish in recognised (established, usually hardcopy) journals with commercial publishers whose subscriptions revenue pays for the labour of publishing. The only possible reason to support an OA journal, apart from a generic desire to support OA as a principle, is that the journal has a project.
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    Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology
    Cubitt, S (Duke University Press, 2017)
    Sean Cubitt offers a large scale rethinking of theories of mediation by describing the ecological footprint of media.