Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities

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Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term 'transmedia' with 'transnational,' they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. The book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital divides. Essays in part 1 examine precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are protagonists in this discursive drama, and focuses on how the transmedia frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively. Contributors include Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefining medium specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian exploring nondigital precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assessing contemporary archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defending the open-ended mobility of newly emergent media. Part 2 addresses various ideologies of the digital with trios of essays by John Hess and Patricia Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Crane redrawing contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina Venegas, and John Caldwell unearthing database cities, portable homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark Hansen, Holly Willis, and Rafael Lozano and Guillermo Gómez Peña examining interactive bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color. An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies, Transmedia Frictions provides sound historical perspective on the social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts, demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent. Each section includes a substantive introduction by one of the editors.