Early Prep for Reading Week

Saturday 5^th February

Early Preparation for reading week.

Piles of books seem to growing on my dining room table. Some have been there for some weeks & are now doubling up as place mats. Although they tend to be on the thick side for place mats they all seem to have a wipe clean surface. As I referred to in an earlier entry I have referenced the book pile. I wanted to only attach a link to the file that holds the book list but word seemed to want to import the whole file so I’ve just imported some of the key texts in this blog and kept the rest as a separate file.

New media : a critical introduction

by Martin Lister and others.302.23,London : Routledge, 2009.415431603

At 466 pages this is a book for skimming!

In the introduction there is a section, How to use the book that states, “This is a large book that covers a great deal of ground. It is likely that most readers will consult one part or another at different times rather than read it in a linear fashion from cover to cover”.

What a relief as aside from time it would take a slow reader like myself to cover this book from cover2cover I would have lost any will to read again and life is too short.

The authors do admit that that the book covers a number of issues that may not always be relevant to a related discipline and that they have tried to avoid the use of overly technical academic language & provide explanations of the concepts they explore. Case studies feature highly and an extensive bibliography is at the end of each chapter.

The book’s parts:

Part1: New Media & New Technologies

Part2: New Media & Visual Culture

Part3: Networks, Users & Economics

Part4: New Media In Everyday Life

Part5: Cyberculture: Technology, Nature & Culture

The website: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415431613/

The website extends the reach of the book into further reading, additional case studies and Internet resources. In this it asks you the reader & the website user to do some synthetic work of your own: this site provides the links, you need to make the connections

Relating back.

CASE STUDY 2.3: What is Bullet Time p152 refers The Matrix [1999] and how the CHI special effects were shot and draws the comparison with Eadweard Muybridge‘s experiments with sequences with still cameras to capture movement in the 1880’s & 1890’s is striking.

CASE STUDY 2.4: Computer Animation p.155

This case study talks about how cinema presented it’s own ‘magical’ technological attractions by channeling into animation & how digital cinema welcomed, what had become a marginalised form back to the centre of moving image culture. “Once prevalent assumptions that computer animation will achieve full photo-realism (generating characters & environments indistinguishable from those filmed conventionally) have been set back years recently.

The study states, “ The materialist analysis of competing codes of Verisimilitude, (noun, the appearance of being true or real) is instructive here. It talks about the weakness of 3D animation with the technical & economic obstacles to the digital rendering of complex textures & shapes. Using the examples of complex structures like the human body, hair or atmospheric effects not lending themselves easily to 3D.

These case studies need to be read around the rest of the chapter to fit into place so this is where I will read around today. This and the several page, Glossary of terms, many of which could fill a chapter with their meaning and understanding of how their terminology would fit into the New Media world.