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Constructing a theory of intimacy describing processes occurring between a 'human' subject and information creations, Jan Stasienko shows in what way and in what phases that relationship is built and what its nature is.
He discusses technologies and genres related to the construction of a new television message (teleprompter, interactive television forms appearing both in the analogue and digital eras), composition of the film image and specificity of cinematic technologies (peep show, hybrid animation, digital visual effects). Also new-media technologies and genres will be discussed (for example, aspects relating to computer games and Web portals making video materials available). This diversity is prompted by the desire to show that the building of intimacy protocols is not the domain of the digital era, and on the other hand, that the posthumanism of media apparatus is a wide-ranging problem, i.e. the area encompasses various vehicles findable throughout various historical periods.
List of contents
Introduction
I. Cinematic Intimacies
1.“Kaleidoscope of Jouissance”: The Erotic Peepshow as a Game on Subjectivity.
2.Classic Animation and the Origins of Intersubjective Intimacy
3.Cinema-Cyborg and Human-Layer Digital Cinema Technologies as Vehicles of Posthumanism
II. Tele-visions
4.Tele-prompter and Posthuman Repositioning of the Gaze
5.Posthumanism Through Interaction: Intimacies, Staring and Collective Creations in “Winky Dink & You”
6.Phone-in Television Quizzes as Vehicles of Deep Digitization
III. Digital Encounters:
7.BeautifulAgony.com and the Eroticism of the Database
8.Bridegrooms of Pixels, Concrete and Steel: The Wedding Ceremony as an Act of Subject Funding
9.“The Sims” and Defining Subject through Cruelty
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jan Stasienko full professor and Director of Research at the Department of Medi and Communication, University of Lower Silesia, Poland and as founding Director of the Digital Masters: Centre for Games and Animation, ULS (Wroclaw, Poland)
Summary
Constructing a theory of intimacy describing processes occurring between a ‘human’ subject and information creations, Jan Stasienko shows in what way and in what phases that relationship is built and what its nature is.
He discusses technologies and genres related to the construction of a new television message (teleprompter, interactive television forms appearing both in the analogue and digital eras), composition of the film image and specificity of cinematic technologies (peep show, hybrid animation, digital visual effects). Also new-media technologies and genres will be discussed (for example, aspects relating to computer games and Web portals making video materials available). This diversity is prompted by the desire to show that the building of intimacy protocols is not the domain of the digital era, and on the other hand, that the posthumanism of media apparatus is a wide-ranging problem, i.e. the area encompasses various vehicles findable throughout various historical periods.
Foreword
A textual exploration of novel subjectivities arising from the interaction between human users and artifacts in the domain of media, ranging from cinema and television to new media, focusing particularly on the concept of 'intimacy'.
Additional text
In this theoretically rich and multidisciplinary study, Jan Stasienko visits various eras and environments of traditional and digital media to find and draw a map of posthuman intimacy built in media apparatuses. Stasienko carefully tracks how and when our existence becomes posthuman by entering various technological realms to look at how our corporeality, sexuality and intimacy are radically reconfigured in these historical and contemporary spaces. The desire to show the profound complexity of the human-information relations coincides here with the ability to build an engaging narrative about what it is like to love and hate codes and meanings shaped in the form of avatars, cartoon characters, CGI personas or immaterial objects of sexual desire.
