Alan Sondheim on Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:14:37 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Reviews of some recent books and then some - |
Reviews of some recent books and then some - These are texts relevant to net art. Some I have found personally more useful than others; this is the result of my own predilection of course. They are review copies. In some cases, I've failed the te(x)(s)t. Digital Video Hacks, Tips and Tools for Shooting, Editing, and Sharing, Joshua Paul, O'Reilly, 2005. I've mentioned this book before. I swear by it. There are very few digital media books I can wholeheartedly recommend - this is one of them. The book covers, in the usual 100 'hacks,' every- thing from writing filters for Movie Maker to distributing DVDs, codecs, converting PAL to NTSC, "See Through Walls" (obvious but very useful), logging, "making your own weather report," Quicktime Pro filters, and ASCII movies. If nothing else, the book has helped me organize things so I can work faster, something always of concern. Lara Croft, Cyber Heroine, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Minnesota, 2005. More and more work needs to be done, not on cyborgs (although this references Haraway, etc.), but on the re/mediations, mediations, projectivities, introjectivities, phenomenologies, histories, and mechanics, of avatars as they enter and enhance/entrance consciousness, singly or multiply. This book covers the game, movie, creation, continuation, of Croft in a mere 89 pages (not including notes and index). It's brilliant and a beginning. My only quibble, and that's all it is, is that virtual idols such as Diki or Kyoko Date (I've written on both, so I have a stake in this) aren't men- tioned; it's as if gaming and its emissions existed outside the apparatus of popular music. A second quibble is the expense - $17.95. On the other hand, this slim text sets a foundation like none other. Chapters include The Phenomenon of Lara Croft, A Duplicitous Gift, The Origins of a Cultural Icon, The market and the Hardware, Medial Origins and Sexual Grounds, Virtual Reality, The Interactive Movie, The Loss of Surface, The Medialization of the Body, The Universal Medium, Tomb Raider: The Movie, The Question of Sexual Difference, and Afterplay: The Next Generation. This is wonderful! Web Mapping Illustrated, Tyler Mitchell, O'Reilly, 2005, Using Open Source GIS Toolkits. If you are working in locative media, GET THIS BOOK! The chapters include Introduction to Digital Mapping, Digital Mapping Tasks and Tools, Converting and Viewing Maps, Installing MapServer, Acquiring Map Data, Analyzing Map Data, Converting Map Data, Visualizing Mapping Data in a Desktop Program, Create and Edit Personal Map Data, Creating Static Maps, Publishing Interactive Maps on the Web, Accessing Maps Through Web Services, Managing a Spatial Database, Custom Programming with MapServer's MapScript, and two appendices, one on map projections, and a MapServer Reference Guide for Vector Data Access. This is heavy on GIS; Google and WorldWind are not mentioned. I've only read this book; I'm not in a position to apply it (I use an inexpensive GPS, that's about it, please, if you have a better one, send it to me!), but it's absolutely clear that it provides a framework for any sort of positional work - not only that, but a framework which goes a long way towards making WorldWind (which is of course open source) useful as a GUI for artists! Mapping is increasingly moving into the forefront of web graphics; this takes you way beyond the surface. The book uses a webpage for auxiliary downloads, taking the user step-by-step through the chapters. Current unix fortune: !07/11 PDP a ni deppart m'I !pleH Start Your Engines, Developing Driving and Racing Games, Jim Parker, Paraglyph, 2005. I'm not interested in creating driving games (although there are downloadable and modifiable files at the website accompanying the book, that make for a very interesting beginning), but I am interested in the physics, interfaces, and phenomenologies of them. This book provides these in abundance; I can't think (at least for me, with my limited knowledge) of a better introduction to a kind of gaming that is based on the physics of world-creation (i.e. little or no story required, but all the makings and packagings of a planet). Chapters include: Starting Your Engines - Basic Design Elements, Game Architecture for Driving and Racing Games, Basic Graphics for Driving and Racing Games, Building a Basic 3D Driving Game, Game AI and Collision Detection, Incorporating Intelligent Opponents, Audio for Driving and Racing Games, Using Ambient Traffic, Physics for Driving and Racing Games, Simulating Continuous Time, Cinematography for Driving and Racing Games, Creating Terrains, Designing the Manic Mars Racer Games, Coding the Manic Mars Racer Game, The Bonus Game--Charged!, refs and resources, a math tutorial, and more. The graphics work through polygons. The book takes nothing but programming for granted. (For intermediate to advanced levels.) I'm fascinated by such things as the need to create continuity, designing collision detection routines - all these things that are of course taken for granted in the 'real.' Terrains are constructed from random functions by the way - the programs can be applied elsewhere. The book demonstrates what goes into perception and the relationship of perception to coding. The games are clearly phenomenology writ large, Husserl's Logical Investigations inverted into the construct of mediations among subject, real, codons. I recommend this for anyone interested in gaming, whether or not they're practicing such. It's expensive ($39.99 or as we like to say $40), so I wouldn't purchase it unless you're going to really use it, in which case it's cheap at the price. Home Networking, The Missing Manual, Pogue, O'Reilly, Scott Lowe, 2005. Okay, I'm stupid about a number of things, including putting things together so that they fit. This goes a long way towards helping me. How to hook up PCs to a router to wireless to each other and possibly to a Mac using something called Dave? It's all here. The Missing Manual series is pretty good in general, giving you the basics that aren't readily available elsewhere. The next step would be the hacks. In any case there are chapters are outlining your home networking plan (if it's not just random cables as mine tends to be), through ethernet, wireless, and powerline, onto various PC/Mac connections, then to the road, various, etc. etc. I need books like this. I'm tired a lot. They tell me what to do and generally they don't make mistakes. Recommended. The Souls of Cyberfolk, Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, Thomas Foster, Minnesota, 2005. I have read into this work, repeatedly, and at this point I don't feel I'm the right person to review it. So consider this an aside before going on to the book. I an increasingly finding theory impoverished / machinic - I can 'do' multiculturalism, postmodernism, postmodernity, poststructural, postoffice, various gendering theories, psychoanalytics, and so forth, and for the most part this doing doesn't take; I'm not learning more than I knew and what I find I need to know is often on the practical side of things. Lara Croft (above) strikes a good balance; this book is strong on theory and I've been having trouble getting through it. Some of the material is stunning, for example a section on The Discourse of Trauma (in the chapter "Replaying the L.A. Riots, Cyborg Narratives and National Traumas). The chapter on "The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic" relates well to both Kyoko Date and Lara Croft, and there is a discussion of Turing's description of the Turing test and its relation to gender ("Instead he takes a detour through another 'imitation game,' based on gender. In this game a man and a woman are concealed from a questioner, who attempts to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Turing suggests that the man try to deceive the interrogator about his gender, while the woman tries to convince the interrogator that she is in fact a woman. Turing then asks, 'what will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game? Will the interpretor decide wrongly just as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"'" Foster then relates (potentially) Turing to queer theory. Moments like these are absolutely wonderful, and I find myself constantly reading into the book, rather than following it chapter by chapter. The chapters are: Introduction: Cyberpunk's Posthuman Afterlife, 1. The Legacies of Cyberpunk Fiction: New Cultural Formations and the Emergence of the posthuman, 2. Meat Puppets or Robopaths: The Question of (Dis)Embodiment in Neuromancer, 3. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Posthuman Narratives and the Construction of Desire, 4. Trapped by the body: Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered performance; 5. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Performativity, Virtual Embodiment, and Racial Histories, 6. Replaying the La. Riots: Cyborg Narratives and National Traumas, 7. Franchise Nationalisms: Globalization, Consumer Culture, and New Ethnicities, and Conclusion: The Antinomies of Posthuman Thought. (From a distance I question the 'posthuman,' just as I question 'cyborg,' 'manifesto,' 'theory.' I find myself tending more towards Penrose and Bohm on one hand, Noh and Buddhism on the other, reconfiguring histories of industrialization from source materials, thinking through early history of untamed radio. I still go back to Kittler perhaps. Language tends to short-circuit otherwise in me, tread paths which appear, but probably aren't, already too familiar. It's not clear whether philosophy is dead or not or even what 'philosophy' and 'dead' mean, but it's clear that philosophic machines, ideological algorithms, deconstructive mechanisms, have already been set into motion, doing the {therapeutic} work for us. The work that needs to be done, might be, most likely is, entirely else- where. I've been thinking about chaparral, avoiding Iran and NK's nuclear arsenals-in-the-making, Bush's and others' fundamentalist ultraviolence. What is the relation of theory to any of these? Does it return, resonate internally, shackled with yet another machinic analysis? This is of course not the case with Foster - parts of the book, for me, are spell-binding, but the project of the book has raised these questions (unfairly, I know) in relation to my own attempts to make sense of the world. For I think, no, know, the world is deeply senseless, causal chains 'hold' only some of the time, and it's not language but randomness which conceals and congeals the violent. In any case, there I am, and apologize for this review. I do say, however, that Lara Croft and The Souls of Cyberfolk are the beginning of a kind of analysis which both has to break the shackles of current theory and tend towards a sort of realism that remains all too absent as long as the 'real' (like 'nature' or 'wilderness') remains in quotation marks. We don't have time for this! We are too small in the cosmos and too strong and greedy in our own befouled nest. Let freedom ring.) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net