Culture Machine

The Hallucinatory Life of Tape – Paul Hegarty

I It would be easy to see tape as part of a sequence in the development of increasingly perfect means of reproducing recorded sound. It would take its place after…

Vinyl is Dead, Long Live Vinyl: The Work of Recording and Mourning in the Age of Digital Reproduction – Greg Hainge

If, as appears to be the case, we have now witnessed the final triumph of the digital over the analogue in audio recording technologies and music distribution, the near total…

Pulse Demons – Eugene Thacker

Contemporary popular culture often privileges the visual representations of swarms. In film, the development of complex algorithms for simulating group behavior has produced a number of spectacular, technologically-sublime scenes. One…

Recordings

The contributions to this special issue of Culture Machine, gathered under the thematic 'Recordings', perform a series of displacements toward the goal of rethinking the cultural logics of technological reproduction in…

Lawrence Grossberg (2005) Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future.

Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 1-59451-113-6. Matt Hills In a sense, I'm probably one of Lawrence Grossberg's intended readers for this volume -- somebody who is generally sympathetic to…

Marquard Smith (ed.) (2005) Stelarc: The Monograph.

Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-19518-6. Does Stelarc's Prosthetic Head Dream of Electric Sheep? Edward Scheer As I read this collection of essays and interviews I was…

Clare Birchall (2006) Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip.

London and New York: Berg. ISBN: 184520143-4. Spied On, Sexed Up and Talked About Gary Walton This study is a cogent and welcome examination of what Clare Birchall calls 'popular…

Timothy Clark (2005) The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-1929-1. Robert Eaglestone Timothy Clark is one of the best-kept secrets of British intellectual and literary-theoretical life. Quietly working away, specialising in the fertile ground…

Slavoj Žižek (2005) Interrogating the Real. Edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens

London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-7110-2 Paul Bowman Žižek is intellectually orgiastic. He jumps from one paradigm to another: from Lacanian psychoanalysis to base-superstructure Marxism; from Heidegger to Hegel…

Tom Cohen (2005) Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies. Volume 1: Secret Agents; Volume II: War Machines.

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-4206-0 and 0-8166-4170-6. Hitchcock's 'Material Whirl' Karyn Ball 'Pardon me while my brain reels,' intones the enemy spy, 'Marvin,' with mock melodrama…