Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis
Part I: AI and Robotics
1. Could the AI of Our Dreams Ever Become Reality?
Jay McClelland
2. Director Alex Garland Converses with Cybermedia’s Scientists and Media Scholars
Jonathan Leal and Carol Vernallis
3. (S)Ex Machina and the Cartesian Theater of the Absurd
Simon D. Levy and Charles W. Lowney
4. Epiphany, Infinity and Transcendent AI
Zachary Mason
Part II: Big Data, Sentience, and the Universe
5. A MASSIVE Swirl of Pixels: Algorithms in Radiohead’s ‘Go to Sleep’
Steen Ledet Christiansen
6. The Rise of the Machine: Body-Knowing, Neural Nets, and Emergent Freedom
Charles W. Lowney
7. The Quantum Computer as Sci-Fi’s Favorite Character
Leonardo P. G. De Assis
8. Composer Ben Salisbury Discusses Scoring Science for Alex Garland
Holly Rogers, John McGrath, Carol Vernallis, and Dale Chapman
9. Ex Machina and the Question of Consciousness
Murray Shanahan
Part III: The Neuroscience of Affect and Event Perception
10. ‘A Solid Popularity Arc’: Affective Economies in Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’
Dale Chapman
11. Cognitive Boundaries, ‘Nosedive’ and Under the Skin: Interview with Jeffrey Zacks
Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, and Dale Chapman
12. Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective Approach
Frederick Aldama and Laura Wagner
Part IV: The Digital West
13. The Philosophy of Westworld
Paul Skokowski
14. New Visions of the Old West: A.I., Self, and Other in Westworld
Christopher Minz
15. Scoring Music for Westworld Then and Now: A Cognitive Perspective
Annabel J. Cohen
Part V: Interface, Desire, Collectivity
16. Director Terence Nance Discusses Random Acts of Flyness
Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Holly Rogers, Liz Reich and the contributors of Cybermedia
17. The Gift of Black Sonics: Interface and Ontology in Sorry to Bother You and Random Acts of Flyness
Liz Reich
18. Technology, Chaos, and the Nimble Subversion of Random Acts of Flyness
Eric Lyon
19. Expecting the Twist: How Media Navigate the Intersections Among Different Sources of Prior Knowledge
Noah Fram
20. Face Color
Bevil Conway
Part VI: Productive Neuropathologies
21. Digital Vitalism
Marta Figlerowicz
22. Neuroplasticity: From Experience to Healing
Sara Ferrando Colomer
23. Where is My Mind? Mr. Robot and the Digital Neuropolis
Patricia Pisters
24. Dopamine Circuits: Wanting, Liking, Habits, and Goals. An Interview about Mr. Robot with Neuroscientist Talia Lerner
Jonathan Leal, Carol Vernallis, and Patricia Pisters
25. The Taste of Cybermedia: An Interview with Hojoon Lee, The Lee Lab at Northwestern University
Julia Peres Guimaraes, Selmin Kara, and Carol Vernallis
Index

Promotional Information

The first book to investigate contemporary media, sound, and music in relationship with new technologies like robotics, big data, and AI.

About the Author

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and Studying Twentieth Century Music (2021) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017) and Transmedia Directors (2019).

Selmin Kara is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University, Canada. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and ecological imaginary in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary.

Jonathan Leal is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, USA. A native of the South Texas borderlands, he studies and creates music and narrative across sonic, visual, and textual media to unpack the legacies of colonialism in and beyond the U.S. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, a compilation album celebrating the Rio Grande Valley’s musical geographies, as well as Futuro Conjunto, a transmedia, Chicanx speculative fiction album named one of the best Latinx releases of 2020 by Pitchfork and Texas Highways magazines.

Reviews

The membrane between media and mind has been dissolving for a century. Cybermedia turns the membrane into an irrigation system. A new kind of practice as much as a book, Cybermedia brings makers, scientists and scholars into dialogues that pass through old borders, subtly transformed and transforming. From comic books to paranoia, neurotransmitters to Radiohead, Cybermedia opens a new landscape of social-technical minds and media as things to study and ways of studying them.
*Sean Cubitt, Professor of Screen Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia*