Professor Aylish Wood’s latest monograph, Invisible Digital: What Animation and Games Tell Us About Software and Digital Culture, delivers a thought-provoking examination of the narratives embedded within computer animation software and algorithms, as seen through the lens of material culture. Structured into an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, the book explores the intricate relationship between digital technologies and cultural narratives, guided by key conceptual frameworks such as production assemblages, relationality, entanglement, software performativity, and material-cultural narratives.
Wood’s approach is characterized by her foregrounding of software itself as an active participant in shaping production culture narratives and on-screen aesthetics. Drawing on the works of scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Adrian Mackenzie, she posits software as “performative,” capable of exerting its own influences within media assemblages while also being entangled with wider ideological claims.
The introduction sets the stage for Wood’s analytical journey, presenting the notion of the “invisible digital” and the importance of considering production assemblages – comprising personnel, technologies, practices, and conceptual frames – in understanding non-interactive multimedia productions. This framework emphasizes the significance of relationality and entanglement in comprehending digital phenomena, not as isolated entities but in their connections and interactions.
Chapter 1, titled “What does water look like?” and evocative of Farocki’s late concerns, scrutinizes the claims of realism in computer-simulated water, offering a historical perspective on water simulation software. This chapter challenges preconceived notions of “realistic” water by unpacking the viewing histories and compromises inherent in simulation programs, thereby laying the groundwork for the subsequent case studies…
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Invisible Digital: What Animation and Games Tell Us About Software and Digital Culture
Bloomsbury Academic
9781501390890
200 pages, 3 black and white illustrations, 2024
Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box
Palgrave MacMillian
9781137448859
127 pages, 2014
David OReilly, Everything, 2017, video game
Hello Games, No Man’s Sky, 2016, video game
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