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This chapter studies four of Alexander Kluge's major film and video works. Kluge's early documentary on the Nuremberg Party Grounds, Brutality in Stone (1961), is often described as an experimental or critical documentary about the legacy of National Socialism, portrayed primarily through an exploration of the monumental architecture of the Nazi period. Yesterday Girl (1965) works against the mythology of the German “zero hour” after the World War II, in which the traumas of the past were repressed, while The Assault of the Present (1985) is concerned by the “temporal imperialism” of the New Media. The Fruits of Trust (2009) attempts to nurture the utopian principle of cinema within the seemingly hostile medium of television in an era marked simultaneously by the “timelessness of the earthly eternity” of capitalism, and a growing economic and environmental crisis that suggests that human beings' time on Earth might be all too limited.

The Introduction defines ‘cinematicity’ and provides a brief lineage of the term. It engages the idea that media inevitably bear each other’s traces, and that no medium may exhaustively be studied in isolation from others. It further signals a commitment to the comparative study of media, which abandons the compartmentalized approach of ‘structuring the study of media around individual media’ (Jenkins). Here intermediality becomes a useful concept for the environment in which this comparative labour is undertaken, since to study intermediality is to follow the intertwined histories and transformative relations between old and new, mechanical and electronic, analogue and digital, word-based and image-based media.

Chapter 2 examines Forest’s work from the 1980s through the mid-1990s, which was characterized by greater emphasis on simulation, symbolism, and the sensory; a more varied “palette” of artistic production ranging from more conventional multimedia installations to ambitious attempts to create temporary alternative channels of networked mass communication; and a series of conceptual experiments in metacommunication as defined in the Aesthetics of Communication movement. Works discussed in Chapter 2 include The Territory of the Square Meter (1980), TheStock Exchange of the Imaginary (1982), Here and Now (1983), Press Conference of Babel (1983), Learn How to Watch TV with Your Radio (1984), In Search of Julia Margaret Cameron (1988), The Electronic Bible and the Gulf War (1991), Telephonic Faucet (1992), and The Watchtowers of Peace (1993). Chapter 2 also discusses Forest’s greater interest in ecological themes, the ramifications of globalization, and more explicitly political subjects (e.g., the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Gulf War, and the Yugoslav Wars) in the late 80s and early 90s.

Chapter Three investigates the turn of the twenty-first century global expansion of Shanghai’s contemporary art vis-à-vis the first international iteration of China’s premier contemporary art event, the Chinese Communist Party-sponsored 2000 Shanghai. The chapter theorizes biennialization-as-banalization vis-à-vis contemporary exhibition practices and the promotion of contemporary Chinese art. The chapter argues that Shanghai Biennial’s curators’ hopes of harnessing the spirit of Shanghai were ultimately supplanted by a generic brand of global contemporary art that neglected the city’s unique historical features and current concerns. This chapter then examines critical responses to the 2000 Shanghai Biennial and critiques of the global positioning of Shanghai’s contemporary art as seen in Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi’s counter-exhibition “Fuck Off,” and in two related works by artists Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong.

The Minitel (French videotex system) is often considered as a “pre-Internet” platform and the art that was created with it as belonging to “network art” and/or “collaborative” practices on a “social media” avant la lettre. In which respect is this true? This article provides an initial map and a typology of minitel-based creative practice by identifying works and documenting its context as it happened in France, compared to other countries. With detailed descriptions of selected works and of the ART ACCES online magazine-gallery project, it proposes an analysis that will be compared to and confront net art, new media art, and current trends in e-publishing.

This chapter investigates the cultural politics involved in the emergence and prevalence of the online epithet of “North American despicable man” (or “beimei weisuo nan” in Chinese and “NAWSN” in short). Combining virtual ethnography and off-line fieldwork research and informed by critical theories of masculinity studies and new media studies, this chapter explores the ways in which race, class, and nationality intersect in constructing and negotiating the cultural meanings of “NAWSN” within overseas Chinese online community. It argues that the emergence and popularity of the notion of “NAWSN” should be understood as a social process of “double emasculation” that feminizes and emasculates well-educated recent Chinese immigrant men with non-elite backgrounds in the United States. A full understanding of the cultural construction of newly emerging forms of Chinese masculinity requires us to attend to not just the gender ideological field in both China and the United States, but also to the transnational dimensions of its construction. Through confronting the “NAWSN” image online, the Chinese immigrant men attempt to compensate for the lack or loss of power in real life, but ironically reinforce the social prejudice against Chinese men and help perpetuate male dominance in the United States.

Artefacts and data with which to understand the diffusion and impact of new media in the Middle East collected between 1996-2014, are explored in this chapter. Data on diffusion is provided by charts and tables; while evidence of emerging Internet cultures and their impact are documented with political cartoons, photographs, advertisements, resistance literature, ethnographic insights and conversations with Internet users. This brief history explains why states in the region may be increasingly confronted with restive publics demanding more responsive governance, and provides four distinct lenses through which to view communication and change in the region. Fear, IT4D, Resistance, and Revolution.

Since meeting in 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz focused their collaborative art work on developing new and alternative structures for video as an interactive communication form and on interactive new media and community-centered social media. With participation by media art and politics theorist Gene Youngblood, this historic conversation follows the work of Galloway and Rabinowitz, beginning with their meeting in Paris and including Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), and the birth of the Electronic Café during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

In Chapter 4, data collected through ethnographic research and structured interviews are used to argue that new media tools when used, can profoundly alter social and political practices in Kuwait. Internet use removes inhibitions, gives the public a voice, encourages people to demand access to current, transparent news and information, and enables citizens to become more engaged and active in the world. In the words of one 55 year old female Kuwaiti participant, the Internet “opens the eyes of the younger generation and because of this, they find more freedom to exercise and they can compare freedom in their countries to that in other countries” (Interview, July 2009, Kuwait City). Explanations for the increasingly volatile political and social environment in Kuwait are explored in light of new media use. The persistence of patriarchy in spite of enhanced civic engagement reveals the puzzling nature of oppositional compliance in the emirate.

This chapter draws together contributions to the volume Subversion, Conversion, Development. Cross-Cultural Knowledge Encounter and the Politics of Design to make several novel arguments in relation to the design and use of ICT’s. Firstly, we note that while attention in new media studies has focussed on the use and reuse of content and meaning, the studies collected here offer a consideration of hardware and technology's potential for re-purposing, redesign, even subversion, in its uptake by different users. But for this to make positive sense, attention must be given to the different value systems, interests, and cultural worlds in which people live. We focus on the theme of knowledge, arguing that all knowledge is local knowledge, and as such, is both vulnerable to, and informative for, the designers of technologies. Imaginaries are highlighted as guiding design and use, and holding possibilities for important innovations and developments of appropriate technologies. The issue of reuse and redesign is approached through an idea of open technology, guided by actual knowledge of different ways of knowing and modes of life.

Twentieth century European philosophy has seen many influential critiques of the technological dehumanisation process, often accompanied by appeals to the humanising powers of art as a potential response. And yet, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters in 1913 that “Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.” What would it mean for art to be “inhuman,” and what relation might inhuman arts have to the dehumanising effects of technology? This chapter traces the idea of the inhuman in art from cubism to new media art, focusing on the reflections on these topics by Lyotard, through his activities both as a philosopher of art and as an exhibition director. It traces the meaning that “the inhuman” has in relation to art in his work from the exhibition Les Immatériaux to his later writings on Malraux, aiming to show how, for Lyotard, a “positive” aesthetic conception of the inhuman can act as an antidote to the “negative” inhuman of contemporary cultural conditions.

This chapter offers predictions for the future of sitcom, especially as it is a genre whose ‘death’ is repeatedly signalled by broadcasters and critics. It outlines newer forms of comedy that draw on contemporary technologies, such as web broadcasting. It also explores more recent developments in sitcom aesthetics and conventions, to examine what impact these may have. The chapter argues that sitcom's death has been prematurely predicted, particularly because the social roles of comedy and television remain undimmed, and the genre is one that productively draws on these.

This chapter examines Lyotard’s consideration of the way that technologies, and in particular information technologies, reconfigure the nature of aesthetic experience. When art uses communication technologies themselves as its matter or medium, the “traditional” model of aesthetic experience becomes problematised. Lyotard argues that this is the case because information technologies determine or “program” a conceptual meaning in advance of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, we no longer have a situation of the “free play” between sensible forms and concepts that constitutes the aesthetics of the beautiful for Kant. Lyotard argues, however, that this decline in aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived need not be understood negatively: rather, it may be seen positively in so far as it furthers experimentation with materials, and activates an aesthetic of the sublime.

The coda summarizes the book’s overarching narrative and goals, and followed by a discussion of the lasting impact of Those 72 Tenants (Qishier jia fangke, dir. Wang Weiyi, 1963) and its remake, The House of 72 Tenants (Qishier jia fangke, dir. Chor Yuen, 1973), on developments in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s as they intersect with political and social change originating during the mid-1960s disturbances. A comparative analysis of these two films demonstrates the porous boundaries across media formats as well as across social and political realms of experiences. The coda concludes with a discussion of Kung Fu Hustle (Kungfu, dir. Stephen Chow, 2004). Kung Fu Hustle, which was financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures International, can be considered as global and international. However, it is also local in its nostalgic expressions. As the book’s final case study, the film demonstrates the Hong Kong cinema’s persistence of the portrayal of a screened community and local identity. In the final analysis, the unique identity of Hong Kong cinema rests in an ongoing quest to construct and screen its distinctive local community.

This chapter examines the way in which German think tanks conducted their policy analyses over the past decades – and how successful they have been. On the empirical ground of four case studies it is shown that the dualism between academic policy-analyses and applied policy-analyses could be overcome by some think tanks. Some other think tanks, however, changed their strategy towards directly influencing the public debate, thereby successfully employing new media on the internet. It seems plausible to argue that the closer think tanks are coupled with the academic community and the more they depend on public funding, the more it seems to be granted that policy advices are academically substantiated.