Digital Aesthetics, the book, can be ordered online from Sage Publications (this link is to the UK site: you can click on to US, Australian and other branches)

ANNOTATED CONTENTS

Preface: The Univeral Touring Machine

A general introduction, with a guide to the five chapters, which deal in turn with the major media of digital forms: reading, vision (two chapters), sound and networking

 Cybercafé
Setting up the question: who are we when we are online?
 Hypertext and the Colonial Dialectic
What are the machines we use, why do they look like this? Has it anything to do with the  bloody history of colonialism?
 A Good Read
First of three types of reading: getting lost in fictions, a private experience
 The Library
Second form of reading: public and organised, origins of databasing
 Browsing and Netsurfing: Playful Reading
Third reading form: introducing the concept of the hyperindividual, of play as alibi, and the synergetic corporation as playpen
 After Privacy: The Politics of Intimacy
Why worry about surveillance? Privacy is dead. A plea for openness and publicising the intimate
 Writing Materials
Originally a much longer tirade against the dematerialisation of writing in contemporary literary studies, arguing that  the physical and material qualities of reading are far more important than textuality. Case study of the art of David Connearn
 

First of two chapters on vision, looking at the other great visual system of the modern world, the map.

 Travelling Light
The links between visual culture and transport technologies
 Critique of Cyborg Vision
Investigating the intricate relations between organic and mechanic eyes in the emergence of cinema
 The Anarchy and Society of Perceptions
The claims of Brakhage and Lyotard about the relationships between images themselves. Cut from here was the long section on impressionism, early cinema and the invention of the pixel available in the outtakes section
 Visual Rhetoric: The Socialisation of Perception
Rhetoric gives a model for understanding the structure of machine perception
 Remote Sensing: Global Images
There remains the problem of realism, addressed here through the digital technologies of remote sensing by satellite
 Deconstructing the Map
Drawing heavily on the pioneering work of the historian of cartography J.B. Harley, an analysis of the relationships between mapping and ideology
 The Ethics of Utopia
First address to the ethics of hope, and to the conception of aesthetics as tied to the ethical through the struggle to keep the future open

Second chapter on vision, with the emphasis on perspective. Against most commentators, I argue that perspective's religious origins have kept it in the realm of special effects, not realism.

 The Trouble with Hubble
Extended discussion of the digital technologies and Big Science politics of the Hubble Space telescope. Trekkies will recongise the pun in the title.
 Zeno's Paradox: Interminable Identities
Achilles and the tortoise, the mathematics of infinitessimals and the pursuit of wholeness through the time-bound processes of representation. Can the theory of representation work?
 From Orient to Outer Space: Cosmic Commodities
A historical search for the emergence of space as ideological playground and site of fantasy, with a detailed argument about the way the commodity form shapes the structures of sensibility (subjectivity) of an age
 Perspective as Special Effect
The title says most of it, except that there are some arguments here about the present not as a new reneaissance, but as a new baroque. Cut from this chapter was the discussion of Simon Biggs work, where these ideas are pursued (at the expense of a really accurate account of the work itself) in the outtakes section
 From Outer Space to Cyberspace
Continuing the historical trajectory from orientalism to science fiction to see how the same fundmental structures inhabit, altered, the imagination of cyberspace
 Hacker Transvestism and the Tourist Mouse
Rewriting Laura Mulvey's famous essay on voyeurism and fetishism, suggesting that transvestism and tourism provide exceptionally clear models for understanding how we feel in digital experiences

The chapter on sound

 Silence
Where else do you start but from silence, and in our time from John Cage.
 Pure Hearing
 Is it possible to hear sound alone, without also hearing its source and its meaning?
 Recording: The Mobilisation of Sound
Recording is intended to make sounds, those most ephemeral of media, permanent; but it also makes them portable
 Transmission: Silent Listening, Silent Reading
Broadcasting subtracts permanence from the newly spatialised sound of recording
 The Incoherence of the Soundtrack
How do sound and image cohere? How, in our time, do sound and text cohere? Do they cohere at all? And is coherence the only virtue?
 Dispersed Spaces: Art Geography
Begins the address to alternative forms of network appropriate to the age of recorrding and transmission. Looking at the work of Trevor Matthison and the Black Audio Film Collective

 Network Subjectivity and the Secret Honour of the Posts
The history of letters -- and their delivery -- opens up a new kind of sibjectivity
 A Brief History of Flow
Water, steam, electricity and information -- and the ways we have found to bury their activites into invisibility, while erecting important metaphorical descriptions of human intercourse
 The Human Biochip
 The cyborg already exists, but on a vast and interpersonal scale. But the corporate cyborg is not all good news
 Junk DNA: Morphologies of Multimedia
Redundant information, garbage culture, and the grounds for evolution in networked societies
 Anonymous History: Globalisation and Diaspora
Alternatives: the global corporate cyborg and its hyperindividual, synergetic subjects, or diaspora and the free flow of evolution. A plea for amateur culture in the age of professional media
 Conclusion
The politics of hope

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