This is a compelling study of the often controversial role and meaning of the new media and digital cultures in contemporary society. Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media yielded to a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. "New Media Studies" crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, which begs the question: where do we stand now; which new issues have emerged now that new media are taken for granted, and which riddles remain unsolved; and, is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how it constitutes us as 'you'. From desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to bloggging to e-learning, from role-playing games to Cybergoth music to wireless dreams, this timely volume offers a showcase of the most up-to-date research in the field from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

Author Christopher Beorkrem shows how material performance drives the digital fabrication process and determines technique. He has recreated and dissected thirty-six of the most progressive works of architecture of the last few years, with perspectives from the designers so that you can learn from the successes and failures of each project. Including step-by-step diagrams and using consistent language and the simplest construction techniques, he identifies the important characteristics of each material, including connection types, relative costs, deformation, color, texture, finish, dimensional properties, durability, and weathering and waterproofing to link the design outcomes to form. The book is divided into five parts by material – wood, metal, concrete, hybrids, and recycled – to help you reference construction techniques for the fabrication machines you have on-hand.

Computer graphics systems are capable of generating stunningly realistic images of objects that have never physically existed. In order for computers to create these accurately detailed images, digital models of appearance must include robust data to give viewers a credible visual impression of the depicted materials. In particular, digital models demonstrating the nuances of how materials interact with light are essential to this capability. Digital Modeling of Material Appearance is the first comprehensive work on the digital modeling of material appearance: it explains how models from physics and engineering are combined with keen observation skills for use in computer graphics rendering. Written by the foremost experts in appearance modeling and rendering, this book is for practitioners who want a general framework for understanding material modeling tools, and also for researchers pursuing the development of new modeling techniques. The text is not a "how to" guide for a particular software system. Instead, it provides a thorough discussion of foundations and detailed coverage of key advances. Practitioners and researchers in applications such as architecture, theater, product development, cultural heritage documentation, visual simulation and training, as well as traditional digital application areas such as feature film, television, and computer games, will benefit from this much needed resource. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Julie Dorsey and Holly Rushmeier are professors in the Computer Science Department at Yale University and co-directors of the Yale Computer Graphics Group. François Sillion is a senior researcher with INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), and director of its Grenoble Rhône-Alpes research center. First comprehensive treatment of the digital modeling of material appearance Provides a foundation for modeling appearance, based on the physics of how light interacts with materials, how people perceive appearance, and the implications of rendering appearance on a digital computer An invaluable, one-stop resource for practitioners and researchers in a variety of fields dealing with the digital modeling of material appearance

Digital Fabrications, the second volume in our new Architecture Briefs series, celebrates the design ingenuity made possible by digital fabrication techniques. Author Lisa Iwamoto explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold. Digital Fabrications presents projects designed and built by emerging practices that pioneer techniques and experiment with fabrication processes on a small scale with a do-it-yourself attitude. Featured architects include AEDS/Ammar Eloueini, Atelier Manferdini, Brennan Buck, MOS, Office dA, Florencia Pita/MOD, Mafoomby, URBAN A+O, SYSTEMarchitects, Andrew Kudless/Matsys, IwamotoScott, Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Chris Bosse, Tom Wiscombe/EMERGENT, Thom Faulders Architecture, Jeremy Ficca, SPAN, GNUFORM, Heather Roberge, PATTERNS, Ruy Klein, and servo.

Building from a range of essays representing multiple fields of expertise and traversing multiple religious traditions, this important text provides analytic rigor to a question now pressing the academic study of religion: what is the relationship between the material and the digital? Its chapters address a range of processes of mediation between the digital and the material from a variety of perspectives and sub-disciplines within the field of religion in order to theorize the implications of these two turns in scholarship, offer case studies in methodology, and reflect on various tools and processes. Authors attend to religious practices and the internet, digital archives of religion, decolonization, embodiment, digitization of religious artefacts and objects, and the ways in which varied relationships between the digital and the material shape religious life. Collectively, the volume demonstrates opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital humanities and material religion. Rather than defining the bounds of a new field of inquiry, the essays make a compelling case, collectively and on their own, for the interpretive scrutiny required of the humanities in the digital age.

In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.