In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’. By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind ...

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists and critical practitioners have become engaged with algorithms. This artistic engagement has resulted in algorithmic theatre, bot art, and algorithmic media and performance art of various kinds that thematise the dissemination and deployment of algorithms in everyday life. Especially striking is the high volume of artistic engagements with facial recognition algorithms, trading algorithms and search engine algorithms over the past few years. The fact that these three types of algorithms have garnered more responses than other types of algorithms suggests that they form a popular subject of artistic critique. This critique addresses ...

The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of a radio documentary. Zig-zagging through the lanes of Govindpuri, Listening into Others explores the vibrant sounds emanating from slum culture. Redefining ethnography as listening in passing, Chandola excels at narrating the stories of the everyday. The ubiquity of smartphones, sonic selfies, wailing, the ethics of wearing jeans, the crossroad rituals of elections, the ...

Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines. So-called ‘content analysis’ provides a means to study (mass) media content in many media shapes and formats to retrieve signs of the zeitgeist, such as cultural phenomena, representation of certain groups, and the resonance of political viewpoints. In the era of ...

Times have changed. The art world and the creative economy are no longer the ones we used to know. The digital economy, the pandemic, and the cuts within the cultural field are some of the many factors that influence our practices and the way artists live nowadays. While some claim that the golden eras are gone, and maybe they are, a community of young artists and thinkers meets to discuss the ways in which the narrative around art and its practices has changed and can be geared towards the future. What does it mean to be an artist today? How to ...

Underneath the user interface of any website—be it simple or complex—lurks the web developer’s struggle with money, prestige, and power. An ever-lasting race to the top, never not working. Yet what are these unseen costs of being a traditional web developer, and who decides the rules of the game? In this book on the psychology of an emerging yet often overlooked profession, Maisa Imamović explores the technological complexities underneath ordinary websites by asking questions such as: Who is a web developer? What does their assistant look like? Why does everybody want a ‘simple’ website? What on earth is WordPress cringe? And ...