Books published by MIT Press Ltd

An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current "drone vision" works.

A neuroscientifically informed theory arguing that the core of qualitative conscious experience arises from the integration of sensory and cognitive modalities.

Images and texts document the legendary Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo when it set the world standard; a history of the program and examples of work by "Buffalo heads" James Blue, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Gerald O'Grady, Paul Sharits, Steina, Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.

This second volume of "Productivity" focuses on comparisons among industrialized countries. Although Germany and Japan are often portrayed as economic adversaries of the US, post-war experiences in these countries support policies that give priority to stimulating and rewarding capital formation.

A novel set in post-9/11 New York City about a supermodel and the ultimate Broadway blockbuster.Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle on Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

In this insightful and incisive essay, Eugene Ferguson demonstrates that good engineering is as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation. He argues that a system of engineering education that ignores nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are dangerously ignorant of the many ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical models constructed in academic minds.

Taking "Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture.In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—"Mitt Romney Style,” "NASA Johnson Style,” "Egyptian Style,” and many others. "Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including "Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.