After the many algorithmic, computational, and digital turns over the last five decades, the ways in which we experience and understand the face as something in and of the environment appear to be fundamentally shifting. Indeed, today more and more corporations, institutions, and governments are using automated facial recognition systems within smart environments for abstracting data capital from facial behavior. Through a post-digital perspective, the author explores a history of ideas about the face in relation to its environment across the artistic, scientific and technologic imaginaries, both constants from the past and changes of the present. This intellectual historiography compares three sources: English folklorist Julia Somerset’s 1939 article “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture,” German neurologist Joachim Bodamer’s 1947 case history “The Face Blind,” and Japanese computer scientist Takeo Kanade’s 1973 doctoral project “Computer Recognition of Human Faces,” as well as their rhizomatic interrelations. By tracing the role of the environment in the study of the face, the author maps a genealogical landscape of ideas that roams across the absence and presence of color, human perception and mediated vision, inner and outer ways of seeing, as well as nonvisible and visible imaging. And, to possibly reconcile the very real ambiguity of the human face with the digital binarism of our increasingly computational planet, the author proposes a “greening of the face” whereby the face and its environment are conceptually modelled as being concretized within a complementary, reciprocal process of becoming. 

The contemporary airport features a wide array of convergent apparatuses that digitize various services, thus modifying the space and creating unique experiences to travelers. Their increasingly haptic interfaces make techno-sensation emerge as of pivotal importance to comprehend the deeper cultural transformation animated by computational apparatuses. This process engages our bodies that constitute a material resource and feed the realm of digital data. As a perceptual machine, airport terminal shapes our sensations and works our feelings but its expanding codespace—assuming haptic image—engenders a novel mode of extra-perceptual experience. Adopting a new materialist and realist approach to computational media inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, this article explores how airport environment is articulated in a techno-intimate manner, and how this transforms our habituated, representational, mode of organizing visual and haptic experience. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and Cubist art, it further addresses aesthetic-ecological questions about our intimacies and the manners they are spatially architected by haptic interfaces. Critically engaging with the example of “The Social Tree” at Changi Airport, Singapore, the article demonstrates how the sensory machines codify travelers’ bodies, thus triggering their becoming-imperceptible. Analyzing airport’s generation of sensation beyond receptivity, this article accounts for how sensory entanglement with haptic interfaces s(t)imulates emergence of an in-corporeal aesthetic—one that no longer rests on distancing vision but (cod)entangled, sensible screen-series. 

Acknowledging the latest renaissance of spatial and immersive media technologies and content (VR/AR), the article reconceptualizes their status as software media and cultural objects. Specifi cally, drawing on work of i.a. Lev Manovich, Alexander Galloway and Oliver Grau, the author argues that due to a wide range of real-time sensory cues that a VR experience delivers, it should be considered as a new type of software media interface, rather than a multisensory projection. The argument is based on case study research on commercially available software applications that strive for converting computer-generated spatial immersive environments into working environments. Consumer-oriented software was selected as the object of study due to its exposure. Consequently, its popularity based i.a. on low entry barrier, leads to a greater social and cultural impact than in-house, corporate VR software or immersive new media arts projects do.

The study focuses particularly on design principles implemented to create a virtual working environment and on interaction methods used as HCI paradigms for managing the data and navigating the environment. In order to achieve a certain level of familiarity and support for legacy data and media, the aesthetics of VR working environments is based i.a. on spatial remediations of established GUI elements and visual skeuomorphism. The analysis shows that VR as a relatively new medium, particularly in non-gaming applications, faces challenges in the area of pre-VR content representation, on one hand, and in taking advantages of the aff ordances off ered by a spatial environment (particularly at the interaction and level), from the other. Theoretically, the study follows software and platform studies approaches, informed by critical theory and media studies perspectives. 

The study is an analysis of data gathering and data processing practices pertaining major PC digital distribution and streaming platforms, that is Valve’s Steam and Amazon’s Twitch.tv. Selected case studies from diff erent than Western perspectives on gaming culture and the use of technology were introduced to assess the globalized state of the industry. The study consists of three parts: first, it deals with the notion of digital spatiality. Second, it scrutinizes the persuasiveness of the multi-layer visual interfaces. Third, it moves into spaces beyond gameplay and addresses the double nature of modern dataveillance techniques which mediate between the visible and non-visible elements of the analyzed gaming service platforms. The methodological scaff olding of the work is based on digital surveillance studies and software studies approaches rooted in the visual aspect of the GUIs (graphical user interfaces).

This article sheds light on the ways in which the relationship between virtual and physical space is reconceptualized in the post-digital era within the context of mobile communication technologies and ubiquitous computing in William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral (2014). Important theoretical discussions took place in the 2010s with regard to how the virtual and the physical space are perceived compared to theories of the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, theories that viewed virtual reality as a parallel space are reconfigured by contemporary theorists, such as Jason Farman, Hidenori Tomita, Adrianna de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko, all of whom, in studying contemporary mobile media technologies, emphasize the hybridity and materiality of virtual space. According to these theorists, since new mobile media (communication) technologies permit different and complex spatial configurations, virtual space should be considered as being part and not separate from external reality. The value of the present article lies in the attempt to view these theories in relation to The Peripheral, a text that was written amidst all these shifts in mobile media technological developments and spatial convergences. In his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson opened up literary writing to the envisioning of electronic technologies and a number of previously unprecedented notions, such as “cyberspace” and “virtual reality.” Three decades after the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson attempts once again to anticipate, capture and articulate in literary terms the cultural and technological changes of his time. By inventing the term “virtually physical” so as to describe the afore-mentioned spatial configurations and their effects on the human body, the author merges the virtual and the physical, while also taking the exploration of the interconnection of the two spaces a step further in an effort to examine the possibility of totally effacing the differences between them. Gibson promotes the equation of the virtual and the physical space, considering virtual space to be an actual space (on the basis, for example, of de Souza e Silva and Sutko’s terminology). The article explores not only how Gibson’s narrative enables readers to visualize through language how smartphone technology reconfigures our sense of virtuality, spatiality and embodied location, but also how the author manages to encapsulate through literary practice the latest cultural shifts in the development and evolution of the field of mobile (screen-based) technologies. 

Categorized as both an instance of ‘durational cinema’ and ‘cinema of stasis’, this paper takes Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep as case study to investigate how the seemingly opposed spectatorial modes of attention and distraction are installed in contemplative film works. This conceptual inquiry is initially enabled by aligning Jonathan Crary’s critical analysis of the contemporary homogenization of perceptual experience with Johanna Drucker’s investigation of conceptions of art. Yet, considering certain historical insights with regard to durational aesthetics and the spectatorial experiences that these elicit, it subsequently becomes necessary to also consider the ways in which a static film potentially stimulates or enables disruption and distraction. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer form the theoretical counterparts to Crary and Drucker, through which the juxtaposition between attention and distraction can be explicated more fully. Ultimately, by means of additional contextual information on Warhol’s film, it is possible to characterize the apparent experiential paradox between attention and distraction that underlies Sleep as a confl icting, yet reciprocal bond.

Review:

David J. Gunkel, Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game Studies, and Virtual Worlds, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 264.

Reviews: 

Mobility: Media, Urban Practices and Students’ Culture, edited by Marianna Michałowska, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wydziału Nauk Społecznych Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, 2017, pp. 246.

Artyści w przestrzeni miejskiej Krakowa i Katowic [Artists in Urban Space of Kraków and Katowice] by Monika Murzyn-Kupisz, Jarosław Działek, Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych

Universitas, 2017, pp. 592.