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Spaces Mapped and Monstrous

Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture

Nick Jones author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:3rd Apr '20

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Spaces Mapped and Monstrous cover

This book presents a critical analysis of 3D cinema's role in contemporary culture, emphasizing its unique properties and paradoxical nature in visual storytelling.

In Spaces Mapped and Monstrous, Nick Jones delves into the complex and often contradictory nature of 3D cinema within the modern visual landscape. This exploration highlights the unique visual qualities of 3D technology while situating it within a broader context that includes aesthetic, technological, and historical dimensions. The book discusses how digital 3D has become a fundamental aspect of contemporary visual culture, yet it embodies a paradox, creating spaces that are both meticulously crafted and strangely distorted.

Jones emphasizes that 3D cinema is not just a technological advancement in filmmaking but a significant tool that influences how we perceive and interact with space. By analyzing the connections between 3D cinema and other digital mediums, such as virtual reality and computer interfaces, he illustrates how these forms of media shape our understanding of visual organization. The narrative weaves through various cinematic examples, including notable films like Avatar and Goodbye to Language, to demonstrate the distinct properties that 3D brings to the storytelling experience.

Ultimately, Spaces Mapped and Monstrous offers a comprehensive critical analysis that positions 3D cinema as an essential component of contemporary culture. By integrating media archaeology, digital theory, and textual analysis, Jones provides readers with new insights into the significance of 3D in visual culture today, making a compelling case for its continuing relevance and impact.

This 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 Experiences
At 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 Aesthetics
In 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 Archaeology

  • Commended for British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), Best Monograph Award 2021

ISBN: 9780231194228

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

304 pages