Actor Avatar

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of »technical others« and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material.

This volume gathers a range of institutional perspectives investigating what the devolution of state power and the so-called democratization of social action means for the nature of authority and how the multiplicity and variety of social actors impacts societies worldwide, extending from focus on agents to actors to actorhood.

This comprehensive collection provides theoretical accounts of the grounds and phenomenon of film acting. The volume features entries by some of the most prominent scholars on film acting who collectively represent the various theoretical traditions that constitute the discipline of film studies. Each section proposes novel ways of considering the recurring motifs in academic enquiries into film acting, including: (1) the mutually contingent problematic of description and interpretation, (2) the intricacies of bodily dynamics and their reception by audiences, (3) the significance of star performance, and (4) the impact of evolving technologies and film styles on acting traditions.

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been developed commercially since the early 1990s [1]. Yet it is only with the growth of the Internet and other high-bandwidth links that VR systems have increasingly become networked to allow users to share the same virtual environment (VE). Shared YEs raise a number of interesting questions: what is the difference between face-to-face interaction and interaction between persons inside YEs? How does the appearance of the "avatar" - as the graphical representation of the user has become known - change the nature of interaction? And what governs the formation of virtual communities? This volume brings together contributions from social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on social interaction in various types of YEs. Two previous volumes in this CSCW book series [2, 3] have examined related aspects of research on YEs - social navigation and collaboration - although they do not always deal with VRIVEs in the sense that it is used here (see the definition in Chapter 1). The aim of this volume is to explore how people interact with each other in computer-generated virtual worlds.

With the technical advancement of digital media and the medium of communication in recent years, there is a widespread interest in digital entertainment. An emerging te- nical research area edutainment, or educational entertainment, has been accepted as education using digital entertainment. Edutainment has been recognized as an eff- tive way of learning using modern digital media tools, like computers, games, mobile phones, televisions, or other virtual reality applications, which emphasizes the use of entertainment with application to the education domain. The Edutainment conference series was established in 2006 and subsequently - ganized as a special event for researchers working in this new interest area of e-learning and digital entertainment. The main purpose of Edutainment conferences is to facilitate the discussion, presentation, and information exchange of the scientific and technological development in the new community. The Edutainment conference series becomes a valuable opportunity for researchers, engineers, and graduate s- dents to communicate at these international annual events. The conference series - cludes plenary invited talks, workshops, tutorials, paper presentation tracks, and panel discussions. The Edutainment conference series was initiated in Hangzhou, China in 2006. Following the success of the first event, the second (Edutainment 2007 in Hong Kong, China), third (Edutainment 2008 in Nanjing, China), and fourth editions (Edutainment 2009 in Banff, Canada) were organized. Edutainment 2010 was held during August 16–18, 2010 in Changchun, China. Two workshops were jointly org- ized together with Edutainment 2010.

Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

This book will examine the issues of IoT according to three complementary axes: technique, use, ethics. The techniques used to produce artefacts (physical objects, infrastructures), programs (algorithms, software) and data (Big data, linked data, metadata, ontologies) are the subject of many innovations as the field of IoT is rich and stimulating. Along with this technological boom, IoT uses colonize new fields of application in the fields of transport, administration, housing, maintenance, health, sports, well-being. ... Privileged interface with digital ecosystems now at the heart of social exchanges, the IoT develops a power to act whose consequences both good and bad make it difficult to assess a fair business.

"This book provides an overview of the major questions that researchers and practitioners in this area are addressing at this time and by outlining the possible future directions for theory development and empirical research on social networking and eDating"--Provided by publisher.