Routledge Digital Encounters

Digital Encounters is a cross media study of digital moving images in animation, cinema, games, and installation art. In a world increasingly marked by proliferating technologies, the way we encounter and understand these story-worlds, game spaces and art works reveals aspects of the ways in which we organize and decode the vast amount of visual material we are bombarded with each day. Working with examples from The Incredibles, The Matrix, Tomb Raider: Legend and Bill Viola's Five Angels for the Millennium, Aylish Wood considers how viewers engage with the diverse interfaces of digital effects cinema, digital games and time-based installations, and argues that technologies alter human engagement, distributing our attention across a network of images and objects. Review "Aylish Wood's argument is timely and relevant. She has offered a rich description of our rapidly changing technological environment, and of the various complex modes of engagment that are offered to us by the digital interface. Her emphasis on the material and bodily character of our 'encounters' with digital media, of our agency in a highly mediated world, is a welcome antidote to more pessimistic accounts of digital culture." - Marc Furstenau, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University, Canada About the Author Aylish Wood is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent. Her current research interests are the impact of digital technologies on the expressive possibilities of different moving image media, including animation, digital cinema, digital games, and the time-based gallery installations.