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The introduction traces the various historical, social, and critical shifts characterising the place of, and discussion of, death in Western culture. Having summarised the key voices and concepts in this discussion, from Philippe Ariès to John Tercier, mainstream film is distinguished as the privileged site for understanding the enduringly ambivalent but strategic role of death. Though pervasive on screen, cinematic death remains shrouded in denial: distorting bodily realities to favour sentiment and/or spectacle. Such distortion is established as strategic, serving salutary and ideological functions for Western society and the Western spectator. This strategic role of death on screen and its aesthetic, psychosocial, ethical and political dimensions provide the focus of the book and are most vivid, the introduction suggests, not in the extreme representations of death but in the seemingly innocuous ones – the romantic, redemptive, and rehabilitatory –for it is these that reveal most starkly a hierarchy of human worth.

This essay looks at our contemporary technocultural hero system, and discusses how it can lead to the behaviors exhibited by school shooters such as Klebold and Harris, Kimveer Gill, Sebastian Bosse, and Cho Seung-Hui. The author argues that social media provide users with a “screen test” for anti-heroic behavior.

The first chapter introduces the reader to the work of Ernest Becker and outlines his theories of death denial and “cultural hero systems.” These concepts are integrated into an existentialist discussion of posthumanism and technoculture, where Ernest Becker meets Bernard Stiegler and Cary Wolfe.

In this final chapter, the author speaks out against what he calls “horror philosophy,” a type of discourse that threatens the ontological dignity of the human being for the sake of celebrating a speculative sort of animism. The author admits the humanist taint of his claims while suggesting that a recognition of the vulnerability of all things must not come at the expense of human vulnerability. The chapter is bookended by discussions of two video art projects: Dust by Herman Kolgen and Datamatics v2.0 by Ryoji Ikeda.

This is a long reading of the film American Beauty that focuses on media technologies (telephone, pager, two-way speaker, handycam) and their capacity to betray their users in deadly ways. The author also uses the film to flesh out Becker’s concept of “immortality ideology.”

Roach Lab, a grad student project created in the Critical Media Lab, provides yet another example of applied media theory as discussed in the previous chapter and exemplified in every other chapter of the book. This student project, which involves live cockroaches in an environment with mechatronic roaches and a video of roach dissection, also initiates the theme of horror that concludes the book. The chapter also discusses Terror Management Theory, a social psychology concept rooted in the philosophy of Ernest Becker.

This chapter outlines the author’s concept of “applied media theory,” which is a method of humanities research rooted in the research/creation practices typical of professional artists. Applied media theory requires scholars to embrace the materiality and finitude of objects, transforming them into objects-to-think-with designed to shape contemporary technoculture.

From 2004-2006, the author toured North America by lecturing while running a hacked treadmill hardwired to a computer. In lectures of 5-7 kilometers, the author ran through various theories about technology and embodiment, using his running speed to control the flow of a video projection. This chapter presents the original script of that performance piece, coupled with still images from a variety of Dreadmill performances.

This introductory essay begins with an anecdote about fishing, in which the author demonstrates his tortured ambivalence toward posthumanist philosophy. The chapter justifies the unusual arrangement of chapters, and sets the overall tone for the book.

Cycle of Dread is the second in a triathlon of works by the author. Here, he describes the work in the context of specific concepts such as avatar, glitch, nostalgia, and flow. This public art project involves a stationary penny farthing bicycle hardwired to a computer so that a participant’s speed and heart rate cause a projected “ghost” to fly across an outdoor walkway. As in his previous work, the author draws on Romantic multimedia artist William Blake and the graveyard poetry tradition.

Here, the author presents a critique of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). His primary argument is that some flavors of OOO are not philosophy at all, but a form of poetic discourse that is at once nihilistic and animistic. The author compares this type of OOO discourse with Romantic idealism and surrealist fantasy.

This is the last in a triathlon of projects created by the author, which in this case involves a canoe equipped with three touch-screen monitors and wrapped in 7 kilometers of fishing line. Recalling the previous chapter’s discussion of “carpentry,” this chapter begins with a detailed account of how to paint a cedar and canvas canoe. This leads to a discourse on “skin” that ultimately lands in a speculative discussion of technogenesis, prosthesis, proprioception, and the death of Canadian artist Tom Thomson.

Chapter 2 describes a performance and video installation that required the author to record on video two crossings of the Windsor/Detroit border: one in his car; one on foot, during the Detroit Marathon. The concept of borders comes into play as a theme for exploring posthumanism and the concept of the human as an always-already technical animal.