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Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture
Digital 3D has become a core feature of the twenty-first-century visual landscape. Yet 3D cinema is a contradictory media producing spaces that are highly regimented and exhaustively detailed, it simultaneously relies upon distortions of vision and space that are inherently strange.
Spaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema to offer a critical analysis of an inescapable part of contemporary culture. Considering 3D’s distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital systems, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts. He examines 3D’s relationship with computer interfaces, virtual reality, and digital networks as well as tracing its lineage to predigital models of visual organization. Jones emphasizes that 3D is not only a technology used in films but also a tool for producing, controlling, and distorting space within systems of surveillance, corporatization, and militarization. The book features detailed analysis of a wide range of films―including Avatar (2009), Goodbye to Language (2014), Love (2015), and Clash of the Titans (2010)―demonstrating that 3D is not merely an augmentation of 2D cinema but that it has its own unique properties. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous brings together media archaeology, digital theory, and textual analysis to provide a new account of the importance of 3D to visual culture today.
Spaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema to offer a critical analysis of an inescapable part of contemporary culture. Considering 3D’s distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital systems, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts. He examines 3D’s relationship with computer interfaces, virtual reality, and digital networks as well as tracing its lineage to predigital models of visual organization. Jones emphasizes that 3D is not only a technology used in films but also a tool for producing, controlling, and distorting space within systems of surveillance, corporatization, and militarization. The book features detailed analysis of a wide range of films―including Avatar (2009), Goodbye to Language (2014), Love (2015), and Clash of the Titans (2010)―demonstrating that 3D is not merely an augmentation of 2D cinema but that it has its own unique properties. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous brings together media archaeology, digital theory, and textual analysis to provide a new account of the importance of 3D to visual culture today.
304 pages, Paperback
Published April 21, 2020
2 people want to read
About the author
Nick Jones
118 books21 followersNick Jones is an author, editor and writer based in Lewes, East Sussex. In 2000, he moved into sci-fi and genre publishing, editing TV and movie tie-in titles (including Star Trek Magazine) and comics/toys collecting magazine Memorabilia, before taking charge of the graphic novels Dept. at Titan Books, where he edited Dan Dare, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, Wallace & Gromit, and DC Comics graphic novels. He is the author of DC Comics Cover Art and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Ultimate Guide; co-author of Marvel Universe: Map by Map, DC Comics Encyclopedia, and The Mysterious World of Doctor Strange. Currently, he is the editor of the DC Heroes & Villains Collection and Star Trek Explorer magazine.
He blogs at Existential Ennui.
He blogs at Existential Ennui.
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