Digital and Other Virtualities : Renegotiating the Image

"If virtuality is being celebrated as heralding a radically new era, rich with new possibilities and futures hitherto unimagined through cybernetics, networking and digitalizaton, such claims are also being viewed with deep scepticism and countered by renewed interest in the groundedness and referentiality of the indexical. Because of digital virtualities in the production of images, the concept of the index becomes relevant precisely in a digital world, as relations between signs, objects, references and bodies become the focus of sometimes anguished and sometimes enthralled critical rethinking. In this transdisciplinary book, major artists, filmmakers, film theorists, philosophers, literary critics, information theorists and cultural analysts examine the twists and turns of the contesting terms of virtuality and indexicality in contemporary cultural theory in relation to history, trauma, sexuality, textuality, anxiety, simulated lives, code, digital cinema, science fiction, and contemporary art." -- p. [4] of cove