Spectacular Posthumanism: The Digital Vernacular of Visual Effects

by Drew Ayers

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501340093
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/18/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Drew Ayers is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at Eastern Washington University, USA. His research focuses on visual culture, digital technology, visual effects, cinema, and nonhuman theory, and he has previously been published in animation, Configurations, Film Criticism, and several edited anthologies. Ayers also serves as a board member and programmer for the Spokane International Film Festival.
Drew Ayers is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at Eastern Washington University, USA. His research focuses on visual culture, digital technology, visual effects, cinema, and nonhuman theory, and he has previously been published in In Media Res, animation, and Configurations.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Vernacular Posthumanism and VFX
Part I: Hybrid Bodies
1. David Cronenberg's New Flesh
2. Performance Capture's Spectacle of Self
Part II: Digital Bodies and Authenticity
3. Digital Nudity, Reanimation and De-Aging
4. Digital Space, Digital Agents and Digital Swarms
Part III: Machinic and Digital Spectacle
5. Kubrick's Machine Vision
6. Planet Earth's Spectacular HDTV
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this richly theorised, original, and engaging account, Drew Ayers allows us to see in new ways how the hybrid and immaterial bodies and spaces of visual effects cinema express the dreams and anxieties of a vernacular posthumanism.” —Lisa Bode, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland, Australia

“In this insightful approach to vernacular posthumanism and visual media, Drew Ayers offers a fresh new way of understanding the posthuman within our contemporary media culture. By intertwining the study of digital special and visual effects, with both a vast array of scholarship and vernacular discussions surrounding posthumanism, Ayers brings to the fore an excitingly articulated study of what it means to be, to think to be, or to illustrate as being, post the human. In so doing, he is able to carve out a nuanced reading of both the utopian and dystopian figurations of the posthuman, showcasing the deep complexity of visual media's exploration of the hopefulness and anxiety of our times.” —Markos Hadjioannou, Associate Professor of Literature and the Arts of the Moving Image, Duke University, USA

“Spectacular Posthumanism effectively argues for the emergence of a new sensorium arising from our encounters with digital media forms (prefigured in the pre—digital). Drew Ayers tracks the hybrid, multi—local, and ambivalently embodied “visual vernaculars” that articulate and construct new ways of thinking our place in a post—, non—, and yet—still—human world. Ayers is voracious and eclectic, skipping lightly but provocatively among media and theories to explore the repercussions of a range of human—tech interweavings, providing sparkling media analyses all along the way.” —Scott R. Bukatman, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Stanford University, USA, and author of Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993)

From the Publisher