About the Book
From Digital to Analog delves into the origins of digitization and its effects on contemporary culture. The book challenges the «common sense» assertion that digitization is just another step in the evolution of the culture of the editorial, film and recorded music industries and their enforcement of copyright laws. Digital technologies in contemporary culture have paradoxically undermined and, at the same time, strengthened such practices, provoking an unprecedented quarrel over the possession of, and access to, cultural products. Agustín Berti uses the release of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) in 1992 to study this paradox. The importance of Agrippa for digital culture studies is proven through the discussion of the frequently understated importance of the materiality of digital culture. The book develops a critique of digital technology and its alleged neutrality and transparency. Ultimately, it illustrates how Agrippa anticipated a number of contemporary phenomena such as piracy, leaks, remixes, memes, and more, forcing us to rethink the concept of digital content itself and thus the way in which culture is produced, received and preserved today. From Digital to Analog is ideal reading for a graduate student readership, especially Master candidates in the fields of Literature, Arts, Digital Humanities, Digital Culture and New Media Studies.
About the Author :
Agustín Berti, PhD in Literature, is head professor of «Analysis and Critique» in the National University of Córdoba. He is a researcher for the Argentinean Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and has published in a variety of journals, including Flusser Studies, Nombres and Interventions.
Review :
«From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects such as the early electronic literary project, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), and of diverse practices of piracy, hacking, bootlegging, remixing, e-poetry, digital memes, leaks, clones, and zombies to understanding the strange life of digital objects and the current cultural formations they unsettle, redouble, and preserve. Its roundabout, thick description of the backalleys of digital culture and critical pursuit of what may appear to be momentary aberrations to acceptable, standardized digital reproduction effectively mobilizes recent philosophy of technology to unpack a series of persistent, unavoidable questions digital objects pose today. The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits, such as digital objects' notoriously immaterial materiality, and underscores the pressing at once technical, aesthetic, political, and economic - importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity. Recontextualizing and rejecting predominant ideologies of the digital as «pure content» by reading them through and against the oblique shadows, contours, and diffractions provided by stray digital literary experiments and other unexpected digital forays, From Digital to Analog reasserts and significantly expands the value of reading electronic literature, print and digital hybrids, and other variously experimental digital practices with full awareness of their critical contributions to digital cultures face to face with their technicity.» (Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology / Author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction) «From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. It comes with a spectrum of well-chosen case studies running from the pre-digital to the digital culture, and authoritative discussions on such topics as the materiality -and its degradation from the originals- of literary, artistic, game works, the analog/digital divide, hybrid (re)production and circulation, opacity and transparency of technology in a genealogical perspective, crafting and cracking codes (the "evasive ontology [and ethics] of copies"), copy rights and piracy, and the everchanging modalities of their conflicting preservation. It is a book that will become indispensable for the study of what the author states as the grounding of codes, and will certainly entice its readers to rethink their assumptions when exposed to our mutating activity of encoding/inscribing/recording and transmitting culture in all its institutionalized/professionalized areas, including the tech industry. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.»
(Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia/Academia Chilena de la Lengua)
«From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse.» Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia, Academia Chilena de la Lengua
«From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects (...). The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits (...) and underscores the pressing (...) importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity.» Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology
