This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies. In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a...

Will we ever be able to see the brain at work? Could it be possible to observe thinking and feeling as if watching a live broadcast from within the human head? Brainmedia uncovers past and present examples of scientists and science educators who conceptualize and demonstrate the active human brain guided by new media technologies: from exhibitions of giant illuminated brain models and staged projections of brainwave recordings to live televised brain broadcasts, brains hooked up to computers and experiments with “brain-to-brain” synchronization. Drawing on archival material, Brainmedia...

Television is the most powerful system of images in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nonetheless, TV has attained only little philosophical attention so far, especially compared to other (visual) media such as film. This book looks at TV as what happens on the screen and beyond it; which is mainly the operation of switching images. It therefore proposes a new definition of TV as the first picture that can be switched on, off, and over, which stresses that TV is more tactile than visual. Through the operation of switching, TV figures the world from within and as the course of its...

Sound Affects: A User’s Guide is a collection of sonically-charged concepts ranging from those felt, ‘heard’ and repeated (silence, the oriental riff, shuffle), to the vocal (whispers, sing, the disembodied voice), to sounds at the threshold (tin/ny, thump, buzz) to sounds beyond the limits of audibility (inaudible tremors, distortion, sub-bass). Sound Affects invites the reader to reflect on the ways that sounds produce affects and the ways that affects can operate as sound. Each of the entries develops a particular perspective on sound and affect through a close analysis of...