Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative
collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity
and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term "transmedia"
with "transnational," they show that the movement beyond specific media
or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more
closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts,
the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give
different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically
at stake in medium specificity and digital politics. Each part includes
a substantive introduction by one of the editors.
Part 1 examines precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are
protagonists in this discursive drama, focusing on how the transmedia
frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most
productively: N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefine medium
specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian explore nondigital
precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assess contemporary
archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defend the
open-ended mobility of newly emergent media.
In part 2, trios of essays address various ideologies of the digital:
John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Wade Crane
redraw contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina
Venegas, and John T. Caldwell unearth database cities, portable
homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark B.N. Hansen, Holly Willis,
and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña examine interactive
bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color.
An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies,
Transmedia Frictions provides sound historical perspective on the
social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts,
demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent.
