Divided into three sections, Error brings together established critics and emerging voices to offer a significant contribution to the field of new media studies. In the first section, "Hack," contributors explore the ways in which errors, glitches, and failure provide opportunities for critical and aesthetic intervention within new media practices. In the second section, "Game," they examine how errors allow for intentional and accidental co-opting of rules and protocols toward unintended ends. The final section, "Jam," considers the role of error as both an inherent "counterstrategy" and a mode of tactical resistance within a network society. By offering a timely and novel exploration into the ways in which error and noise "slip through" in systems dominated by principles of efficiency and control, this collection provides a unique take on the ways in which information theory and new media technologies inform cultural practice.

From the screen of our laptops, and from the ubiquitous portable devices, smart phones, and media players, to the embedded computation in clothes, architecture and big urban screens, interfaces are everywhere. They are simultaneously demanding our attention and computing quietly in the background, turning action into inter-action, and mediating our experience of and relations to the social and environmental. But how can aesthetics respond to this, and how do interfaces set the scene for artistic practices? Interface Criticism is not another design manual but a critical investigation for readers interested in the aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of interfaces. With contributions from leading researchers within the field, the book covers a wide range of aesthetic expressions - including urban screens, wearable interfaces, performances, games, net-art, software art, and sound art, and discusses how new cultures evolve around, for example, open souce or live coding. The volume critically investigates the aesthetics of interfaces in ways that transcend the iconic surface of the graphical user interface and goes beyond the buttons. Ultimately the book develops interface aesthetics as an appropriate paradigm for a critical discussion of the computer.

Leading media scholars consider the social and cultural changes that come with the contemporary development of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing and our cultural life promise to become completely interwoven: technical currents feed into our screen culture of digital television, video, home computers, movies, and high-resolution advertising displays. Technology has become at once larger and smaller, mobile and ambient. In Throughout, leading writers on new media--including Jay David Bolter, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich--take on the crucial challenges that ubiquitous and pervasive computing pose for cultural theory and criticism. The thirty-four contributing researchers consider the visual sense and sensations of living with a ubicomp culture; electronic sounds from the uncanny to the unremarkable; the effects of ubicomp on communication, including mobility, transmateriality, and infinite availability; general trends and concrete specificities of interaction designs; the affectivity in ubicomp experiences, including performances; context awareness; and claims on the "real" in the use of such terms as "augmented reality" and "mixed reality."

Edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schapf.

Illustrates artistic expressions made with an emphasis on videogames. Text in English and Italian.