Postdigital Aesthetics

Postdigital Aesthetics is a contribution to questions raised by our newly computational everyday lives and the aesthetics which reflect both the postdigital nature of this age, but also critical perspectives of a post-internet world.

This book explores approaches to developing and using postdigital humans and the impact they are having on a postdigital world. It presents current research and practices at a time when education is changing rapidly with digital, technological advances. In particular, it outlines the major challenges faced by today’s employers, developers, teachers, researchers, priests and philosophers. The book examines conceptions of postdigital humans and studies the issue in connection with ethics and employment, as well as from perspectives such as philosophy and religion.

Postdigital Storytelling offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today: digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of metamodernism as our dominant cultural condition. This volume argues that metamodernism has brought with it a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. Jordan explores the emerging poetics of this inherently transmedial and hybridic postdigital condition through a detailed analysis of hypertextual, locative mobile and collaborative storytelling. With a focus on twenty-first century storytelling, including print-based and nondigital art forms, the book ultimately widens our understanding of the modes and forms of metamodernist creativity. Postdigital Storytelling is of value to anyone engaged in creative writing within the arts and humanities. This includes scholars, students and practitioners of both physical and digital texts as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary practice-based research in which storytelling remains a primary approach.

Argues we are in a post-digital moment, where the blurring between the "real" and the "digital" has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world.

The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory and contemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples of art that are increasingly an important influence for today's culture and society.

This book explores genealogies and the challenges related to the concept of the postdigital, the ambiguous nature of postdigital knowledges, and the many faces of postdigital sensibilities. The book answers three key questions: What is postdigital knowledge? What does it mean to do postdigital research? What, if anything, is distinct from research conducted in other perspectives? As such, this book is a one-stop publication for those interested in the theory of postdigital research. Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives is complemented by Constructing Postdigital Research: Method and Emancipation, also edited by Petar Jandrić, Alison MacKenzie, and Jeremy Knox, which explores these questions in practice.

In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering. This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked 'informational selves' in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron's Avatar, Blast Theory's Karen, Ontroerend Goed's A Game of You, Randy Rainbow's online videos, Sisters Grimm's Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre's Lippy and Chekhov's First Play and Jo Scott's practice-as-research in 'place-mixing'. This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

This book explores the purpose, role and function of the university and examines the disconnection between students’ approaches to learning and university strategy. It centres on the idea that it is vital to explore what counts as a university in the twenty-first century, what it is for, and for whom, as well as how it can transcend social divisions. The universities of the twenty-first century need to have larger audiences, a broader voice, a shift away from othering and an effective means of progressing such shifts. What is central to such exploration is the idea that learning needs to be seen as postdigital. With a focus on how the growth of technology has and continues to affect university learning, this book: explores the concepts of the digital and the postdigital promotes just and inclusive pedagogies for higher education considers ways to ensure learning is an ethical and political experience studies how to understand community and collective values through higher education suggests ways of promoting personal and collective responsibility for our world and its peoples presents ways in which the university can challenge ideologies based on capitalist modes of consumption, privilege and exploitation Digital and Postdigital Learning for Changing Universities is essential reading for anyone seeking to reimagine the university in a postdigital age, despite institutional structuration and government intervention. It challenges current assumptions and practices, and encourages new ways of thinking about higher education and learning in the twenty-first century.