Invisible Digital - by Aylish Wood (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Explores software and shows how moving image studies contribute to the wider and growing debates about algorithmic culture"--

Book Synopsis

Invisible Digital helps us makes sense of something we cannot see by presenting an innovative approach to digital images and digital culture. At its heart is a novel method for exploring software used in the creation of moving images as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. The three main case studies of Invisible Digital are the animated feature Moana (2016) and the computer games No Man's Sky (2016) and Everything (2017). All three were created using procedural techniques: simulation software for Moana, and procedural content generation for No Man's Sky and Everything. Production culture disclosures associated with procedural techniques often emphasize the influences of automated systems and their algorithms, making them ideal for a study that interrogates digital processes.

The approach of Invisible Digital is informed by relational theories and the concept of entanglement based on materialist perspectives, combined with insights from work that more explicitly interrogates algorithms and algorithmic culture. Aylish Wood employs the notion of assemblages to introduce the concept of material-cultural narratives. Using this conceptual framework, she draws out material-cultural narratives for each case study to demonstrate what they reveal about software and digital culture. These analyses of software provide a widely applicable method through which moving image studies can contribute more fully to the wider and growing debates about algorithmic culture.

Review Quotes

"In Invisible Digital Aylish Wood provides a timely and rich illumination of the complex interrelations between software and culture that underpin digital moving images of the natural world in our games and animation." --Lisa Bode, Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies, University of Queensland, Australia

"As AI systems and processes proliferate across all areas of cultural production, Aylish Wood's study of the material-cultural narratives that emerge from software couldn't be timelier and more essential. Drawing on the animated feature Moana and the video games No Man's Sky and Everything, Wood deftly teases out the relationality between digital processes in the animation, visual effects, and gaming industries, and the production assemblages and discourses that underpin their reception. Combining relational theory, materialism, and production studies, her insightful analysis offers a valuable blueprint for understanding contemporary digital forms through the cultural and technological mediations that surround them." --Mihaela Mihailova, Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, USA

"This is a fascinating and essential work for anyone interested in the study of computer animation and video games. Aylish Wood dares to look beneath the surface of our digital images and explore the complex simulations, algorithms and software that underpin their production. Equally comfortable contending with mathematical models and digital media theory, Wood elucidates the technical, aesthetic and social issues involved in the creation and reception of increasingly "automated" games and animation. No one is better at analyzing the cultural and computational entanglements involved in contemporary digital images." --Joel McKim, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

"Revealing the contours and assemblages of software, algorithms, and platforms in animations found across the contemporary media landscape, Invisible Digital wonderfully connects studies of computational technology to aesthetic form. Aylish Wood's materialist analyses show how wave particles or procedurally generated worlds that exist in software animations not only offer ways of understanding digital culture, but the manner through which it is entangled with broader cultural histories, contexts, and narratives. With technical explanations that are both thorough and accessible, Invisible Digital provides an invaluable mapping of computational media, contemporary culture, and the wonders of animation that emerge at their intersection." --Andrew Johnston, Associate Professor, North Carolina State University, USA

"Aylish Wood tackles the 'black box' of algorithmically produced screen images with a clarity that by turns informs, enlightens, and delights. Placing software's materiality - its processes, capabilities, constraints - at the heart of her analysis of procedural animation in cinema and videogames, Wood shows how software's computational influences intersect with creative and design choices and broader contexts of production. At the same time, she traces the origins and influences of wider cultural narratives about the potentialities of software.

This remarkable book is essential reading for anyone interested in precisely how software matters to digital moving image media and the ways they are designed, debated and consumed. Wood's timely intervention gives us just the tools we need to understand screen-based cultural production in the current and future eras of software and AI." --Lisa Purse, Professor of Film, University of Reading, UK

About the Author

Aylish Wood is Professor of Animation and Film Studies in the School of Arts at the University of Kent, UK. She has published in a range of journals (including Screen, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Convergence, Games and Culture) and the author of Software, Animation and the Moving Image (2014), Digital Encounters (2007) and Technoscience in Contemporary American Films (2002)