Bøker av Sean Cubitt

Ecologies of truth in a post-truth era.The problem with Neo-Nazis is not that they don’t trust the media but that they trust them too much. White supremacists are absolutely convinced by their supremacy. They distrust technologies and climate change as much as the global poor because, as white Europeans, they believe they are exempt from exploitation. This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European models of communication exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity. Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, not least the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies. The emergent cybernetics of the 1940s has become the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Truth opposes its division of the world between subjects and objects, signals and noise, emphasizing that there can be no return to some primal Eden of unfettered exchange. Instead, these divisions, which have fundamentally reorganized the commodity form that they inherited, are the historical conditions we must confront. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create a new commons and a new politics grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that can no longer be restricted to humans alone.

Sean Cubitt offers a large scale rethinking of theories of mediation by describing the ecological footprint of media. He investigates the energy, material, and space needed to create, operate, and dispose of electronic devices, and shows how changing how we use media is the only solution to planetary devastation.

Videography is an attempt to discover the conditions under which it is possible to speak, write and teach about the electronic media. A theoretical section tests the claims of various theses in art history, media and cultural theory to account for the variety of video practice in the contemporary scene.

Exploring the power and capabilities of video, this text describes how viewers have found a new cultural relationship through electronic recording. The study considers the roles of distributors, censors, technicians, reviewers and exhibitors as well as viewers.

This book investigates the aesthetic nature and purposes of computer culture in the contemporary world. It casts a cool eye on the claims of cybertopians, tracing the globalization of the new medium and enquiring into its effects on subjectivity and sociality.