Description
Book SynopsisSpaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema and its place in today’s visual landscape. Considering 3D’s distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital culture, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts.
Trade ReviewThis book’s highly polished arguments situate digital 3D cinema within major debates about the role of the image in contemporary society as well as related structures of power. Jones’s historical focus and interaction with significant visual culture debates situate the unique contribution this book has to offer. -- Miriam Ross, author of
3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile ExperiencesAt once rigorously historical, inventively erudite, and highly original,
Spaces Mapped and Monstrous combines digital theory, screen aesthetics, and media archaeology to persuasively argue that the digital aesthetics in 3D cinema should not be dismissed as "failed realism" or cheap gimmicks. Instead, these examples provide new spatial relations and epistemological regimes that help us better understand digital technologies more broadly. -- Julie Turnock, author of
Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster AestheticsIn this expansive inquiry, Nick Jones dispels the myth that 3D is simply a variant of planar cinema. For over a century, Jones contends, 3D has been vital to a shifting understanding of what images are and how we are mobilized through them. Encompassing both its experimental anamorphic facets and its complicity in the instrumentalization of the visual field, this account is a call for us to think 3D again. -- Janet Harbord, author of
Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film ArchaeologyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Contexts1. History: The Long View of 3D Film and Theory
2. Visualization: From Perspective to Digital 3D
Part II: Mapped Spaces3. Simulation: Dematerializing and Enframing
4. Immersion: Entering the Screen
5. Surveillance: Converting Image to Space, World to Data
Part III: Monstrous Spaces6. Defamiliarization: Rethinking the Screen Plane
7. Distortion: Unfamiliar and Unconventional Space
8. Intimacy: The Boundedness of Stereoscopic Media
Conclusion: Seeing in 3D
Notes
Bibliography
Index
