Two thousand years ago, Ovid asked his readers to imagine metamorphoses in which men and women became flowers and beasts. Today, before our cinema-savvy eyes, people melt and re-form as altogether new creatures: they "morph." This volume explores what digital morphing means -- both as a cultural practice specific to our times and as a link to a much broader history of images of human transformation. Meta-Morphing ranges over topics that include turn-of-the-century "quick-change" artists, Mesoamerican shamanic transformation, and cosmetic surgery; recent works such as Terminator 2, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Heavenly Creatures, and Forrest Gump; and the transformations imagined by Kafka, Proust, and Burroughs. The contributors look not only at the technical wizardry behind digital morphing, but also at the history and cultural concerns it expresses.

Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer’s physical response and more with generating information flow, awe, disorientation, and the disintegration of spatial boundaries. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time. Films discussed include Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), The Matrix (1999), and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film The Celebration (1998).

Coding, Shaping, Making combines inspiration from architecture, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics and computation to look towards the future of architecture, design and art. It presents ongoing experiments in the search for fundamental principles of form and form-making in nature so that we can better inform our own built environment. In the coming decades, matter will become encoded with shape information so that it shapes itself, as happens in biology. Physical objects, shaped by forces as well, will begin to design themselves based on information encoded in matter they are made of. This knowledge will be scaled and trickled up to architecture. Consequently, architecture will begin to design itself and the role of the architect will need redefining. This heavily illustrated book highlights Haresh Lalvani’s efforts towards this speculative future through experiments in form and form-making, including his work in developing a new approach to shape‐coding, exploring higher‐dimensional geometry for designing physical structures and organizing form in higher-dimensional diagrams. Taking an in-depth look at Lalvani’s pioneering experiments of mass customization in industrial products in architecture, combined with his idea of a form continuum, this book argues for the need for integration of coding, shaping and making in future technologies into one seamless process. Drawing together decades of research, this book will be a thought-provoking read for architecture professionals and students, especially those interested in the future of the discipline as it relates to mathematics, science, technology and art. It will also interest those in the latter fields for its broader implications.

Moving from an exploration of 19th century popular science and magic to Hollywood science fiction cinema of our time, Pierson examines the history, advancements and connoisseurship of special effects.

"The savvy critical essays in this provocative collection investigate the interface between science fiction and postmodern culture. . . . Highly recommended for readers at all levels."—Choice

You are girlish, our images tell us. You are plastic. Girlhood and the Plastic Image explains how, revealing the increasing girlishness of contemporary media. The figure of the girl has long been prized for its mutability, for the assumed instability and flexibility of the not-yet-woman. The plasticity of girlish identity has met its match in the plastic world of digital art and cinema. A richly satisfying interdisciplinary study showing girlish transformation to be a widespread condition of mediation, Girlhood and the Plastic Image explores how and why our images promise us the adaptability of youth. This original and engaging study will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience including scholars of media studies, film studies, art history, and women's studies.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.