This book argues that contemporary digital blockbusters function as laboratories for posthuman cognition that transform spectatorship into a cyborg mode in which perception, memory, and agency are distributed across the cinematic canvas, the diegetic bodies of characters, the formal operations of film style, and the embodied cognition of the spectator.Drawing on posthumanist theory and the framework of 4E cognition, it introduces four interlinked concepts – embodied and

This book examines the structuring of space in Romanian and Hungarian cinema, and particularly how space is used to express the deep imprint of a socialist past on a post-socialist present. It considers this legacy of the Eastern European socialist regimes by interrogating the suffocating, tyrannical and enclosing structures that are presented in film. By tracing such paradigmatic models as horizontal and vertical enclosure, this book aims to show how enclosed spatial structuring restages ...

**From an award-winning cultural theorist, the classic work on the intricate relationship between longing and belonging“A remarkable book… brilliant.”―New York Times**Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nosta...

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power.Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary a...

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and the avant-garde theatre of Bertolt Brecht or Samuel Beckett. But what really defines modernism? Why did it begin and how long did it last? Is Modernism over now? Chris Rodriguez and Chris Garratt's brilliant graphic guide is a brillia...

An in-depth analysis of game development and rules and fiction in video games—with concrete examples, including The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto, and moreA video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules...

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive...

Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics explores the concept of "glitch" alongside contemporary digital political economy to develop a general theory of critical media using glitch as a case study and model, focusing specifically on examples of digital art and aesthetics. While prior literature on glitch practice in visual arts has been divided between historical discussions and social-political analyses, this work provides a rigorous, cont...

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Ranci�re, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated t...

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X,...

Why have certain kinds of documentary and non-narrative films emerged as the most interesting, exciting, and provocative movies made in the last twenty years? Ranging from the films of Ross McElwee (Bright Leaves) and Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I) to those of Abbas Kiarostami (Close Up) and Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), such films have intrigued viewers who at the same time have struggled to categorize them. Sometimes described as personal documenta...

In What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, U...