Bloomsbury Spectacular Posthumanism: The Digital Vernacular of Visual Effects

Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which they manifest themselves in popular film, television, and other media, specifically in these media objects deployment of visual effects (VFX). As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, related anxieties register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images imagine and visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience. Drawing on and extending Cara Finnegans concept of image vernaculars, Miriam Hansens vernacular modernism, and a variety of work on the posthuman, transhuman, and nonhuman, Drew Ayers explores contemporary VFX as speaking in a vernacular posthumanism. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayerss innovate close-reading of popular, mass-market media objectsincorporating film, television and video gamesreveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanitys place within the contemporary world, fantasizing about a transhuman future while also subtly acknowledging the significant problems of that fantasy. Review Spectacular Posthumanism effectively argues for the emergence of a new sensorium arising from our encounters with digital media forms (prefigured in the pre-digital). Drew Ayers tracks the hybrid, multi-local, and ambivalently embodied "visual vernaculars+? that articulate and construct new ways of thinking our place in a post-, non-, and yet-still-human world. Ayers is voracious and eclectic, skipping lightly but provocatively among media and theories to explore the repercussions of a range of human-tech interweavings, providing sparkling media analyses all along the way.Scott R. Bukatman, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Stanford University, USA, and author of Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993)In this insightful approach to vernacular posthumanism and visual media, Drew Ayers offers a fresh new way of understanding the posthuman within our contemporary media culture. By intertwining the study of digital special and visual effects, with both a vast array of scholarship and vernacular discussions surrounding posthumanism, Ayers brings to the fore an excitingly articulated study of what it means to be, to think to be, or to illustrate as being, post the human. In so doing, he is able to carve out a nuanced reading of both the utopian and dystopian figurations of the posthuman, showcasing the deep complexity of visual media's exploration of the hopefulness and anxiety of our times.Markos Hadjioannou, Associate Professor of Literature and the Arts of the Moving Image, Duke University, USAIn this richly theorised, original, and engaging account, Drew Ayers allows us to see in new ways how the hybrid and immaterial bodies and spaces of visual effects cinema express the dreams and anxieties of a vernacular posthumanism.Lisa Bode, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland, Australia About the Author Drew Ayers is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at Eastern Washington University, USA. His research focuses on visual culture, digital technology, visual effects, cinema, and nonhuman theory, and he has previously