Books by Drew Ayers
Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembod... more Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world.
Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.
Publisher Website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/spectacular-posthumanism-9781501340086/
Preview: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5ca77cd25f15030001900ebb
Journal Articles by Drew Ayers
animation, 2014
Over the last two decades, the technologies of performance capture and robotic surgery have incre... more Over the last two decades, the technologies of performance capture and robotic surgery have increased in both use and visibility. While these technologies might initially seem quite dissimilar, they each produce a human–machine assemblage that enacts itself across different scales. Each technology ‘captures’ a performance, translates that performance into digital information, and recodes that performance into another body. This article argues that both performance capture and remote surgery penetrate the materiality of the body and reconstitute that materiality elsewhere, as a human’s bodily movements are captured, transmitted, translated, and finally recoded into that of another body, be it an analogue or digital form of embodiment. The shift in scale produced by each technology – in terms of movement, perception, experience, and sensation – demonstrates the extent to which these technologies of telepresence foster a multilocal experience of the body, the dispersion of authorial control across the human–machine assemblage, and a reinforcement of embodied experience despite an embrace of cultural fantasies of the disembodiment of information. This article takes an explicitly phenomenological position, examining the connective tissue that binds actor and avatar, surgeon and robot. The ligaments that connect human and nonhuman both separate and draw the entities close together, and this article explores the resultant shifts in scale, perception, and experience engendered by performance capture and robotic surgery.
Configurations, 2011
In DNA portraits, a visualization of a DNA sample—an “inner” structure comes to stand in for the ... more In DNA portraits, a visualization of a DNA sample—an “inner” structure comes to stand in for the individual represented in the portrait. This essay places DNA portraits within an intellectual approach to photography that regards the photographic process as a technique by which the invisible inside might be made material in the photographic image. DNA portraits do not share the same mode of production as photographic portraiture, and yet, despite significant technological and cultural shifts, the nineteenth-century image vernaculars survive within these twenty-first-century visual objects. DNA portraits point toward a larger cultural concern enabled by the genomic revolution: that of the ability of DNA to function as a material expression of some internal essence. DNA portraits also rely on computing and information-processing technologies, exposing the extent to which they draw on a framework of understanding that regards biological material in terms of bits of computing data.
Book Chapters by Drew Ayers
A Companion to the Action Film, 2019
In contemporary cinema, the body, like the digital image, has become a composite, a layered const... more In contemporary cinema, the body, like the digital image, has become a composite, a layered construction able to be altered and manipulated. Just as the digital image is malleable and moldable, so too is the body. Both the image and the bodies within the image are subject to the logic of the digital information age, which requires that all things be reduced to the common equivalent of code, equally exchangeable and transferable with each other. Within this context, bodies become simply another expression of code, something that can be layered and composited within the digital image. Throughout the history of action cinema, the body of the performer has been vital to authenticating the truth of the performance. From the stunts of Buster Keaton to the action-comedy of Jackie Chan, the body-in-motion verified the authenticity of the screen action. This trend continues in the hardbody action cinema of the 1980s, which casts beefy actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, figures whose muscular physiques index both the truth of their embodiment and the labor required to craft such a body. In a dominant strain of contemporary VFX-driven action cinema, however, the body of the performer, while inheriting the gym-obsessed appearance of its 1980s forebears, doesn’t possess their same truth-value. These are bodies situated within and supplemented by digital effects. The phenomenological authenticity of these composite, informational bodies is called into question through their location within a completely malleable screen image. If the 1980s action body was informed by an industrial cultural logic, and the 1990s action body was informed by a postmodern cultural logic, then the action body of the early 21st century is informed by an informational cultural logic. The central claim of this chapter is that digital technologies like performance capture, body scans, and other VFX have both challenged and reworked the relationship between embodiment and authenticity in action cinema. If the hardbody action films of the 1980s were marked by an excessive attention to the body, the VFX-driven action films of today are marked by the seamless integration of the body into virtual spaces. The “truth” of the contemporary action body lies not only in its muscular appearance, but also in its ability to merge into the digital image, one component among many in the final composite. This informational action body creates an anxiety regarding the phenomenological truth of the image. We find this anxiety, for example, in the rhetoric surrounding a film like 300. Commentary in the popular press questioned whether or not the bodies were “real” or the product of “CGI magic.” This kind of commentary is notably absent in the coverage of the Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies of the 1980s. This anxiety also surrounds motion capture performances. Andy Serkis, for example, performs much rhetorical effort to authenticate the presence of his body in the animated image, and he does so by tying his performance to discourses of authentic method acting. VFX are also being used to “de-age” and reanimate action stars, such as Schwarzenegger in the most recent Terminator films and Paul Walker in Furious 7. Here, the physical bodies—or at least parts of them—are placed in direct dialog with their digital recreations, creating a circuit of exchange between actual and virtual embodiment, which fundamentally transforms the historical authenticity of hardbody action stars.
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015
Ayers utilizes posthuman theory to offer an analysis of ‘hybrid images’—visual effects images tha... more Ayers utilizes posthuman theory to offer an analysis of ‘hybrid images’—visual effects images that composite analog and digital elements into a cohesive whole. Focusing on the software and technology that creates images of digital swarms (such as those found in The Lord of the Rings films), this chapter argues that these hybrid, chimeric images visualize an imagined posthuman future, one in which flesh and information enter into a formal, aesthetic, and ontological exchange. Hybrid images of crowd simulation and digital swarms stage an encounter between human and nonhuman elements, and they force a confrontation between differing modes of agency and subjectivity, revealing both the hopes and anxieties of a potential posthuman future.
Special Effects: New Histories/Theories/Contexts, 2015
The warrior body as agent of labor is the subject of “Bleeding Synthetic Blood,” which analyzes t... more The warrior body as agent of labor is the subject of “Bleeding Synthetic Blood,” which analyzes the “simulated space” of 300 (2006) as a staging ground for tensions between the analog and digital, and the materialization of information itself. 300’s Spartan bodies are particularly productive of meaning in their muscular visibility.
Papers by Drew Ayers
Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembod... more Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience. Publisher Website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/spectacular-posthumanism-9781501340086/ Preview: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5ca77cd25f15030001900ebb
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015
In a dream sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), homeless orphan Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfiel... more In a dream sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), homeless orphan Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) discovers a mysterious key lodged in the tracks at the train station in which he makes his home. Hugo jumps onto the tracks in order to retrieve the key, only to be run over by an approaching train. While this scene is notable for its fast-paced action, kinetic editing and cinematography, shock value and suspense, the environment in which the scene takes place is, at least superficially, rather unremarkable. The train station and its inhabitants, while quite stylish and evocative of the time period, appear as photorealistic, seamless components of the mise-en-scene. In reality, however, much of this environment is a digital simulation, from the setting to the props to the characters, and in this regard, this scene from Hugo is indicative of much of contemporary mainstream filmmaking. The film achieves its photorealistic verisimilitude through the compositing of actual pro-filmic material with virtual computer-generated elements, resulting in a hybrid image of digital and analogue forces. While the completed image effectively adheres to the traditional stylistic conventions of narrative film, many of the individual components of the image are digital simulations.
animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2014, Vol. 9(2) 212 –227
A Companion to the Action Film
human labor, though they differ in the ways in which they foreground their embodiment of abstract... more human labor, though they differ in the ways in which they foreground their embodiment of abstract labor. As Marx argues, “The body of the commodity, which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour.”106 While they are visual equivalents within the diegesis of the film, the abstract labor congealed in the “bodies” of the digital and analog images are founded on very differ-‐ ent forms of concrete labor. The bodies of the Spartan warriors depicted in film can be conceptualized as a form of ab-‐ stract human labor rooted in the concrete labor of physical/bodily exertion. Each Spartan body rep-‐ resents not only the work, suffering, sacrifice, and dedication needed to create it, but also, by proxy, the work, suffering, sacrifice, and dedication of the entire Spartan army. The Spartan army is a sin-‐ gle unit, fighting together in a phalanx and relying on each other to surv...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
Focusing on a series of YouTube creators, this essay interrogates the persistence of the hegemoni... more Focusing on a series of YouTube creators, this essay interrogates the persistence of the hegemonic power of the white male hardbody, arguing that digital facial replacements – in particular those of 1980s action stars – produce a mode of white, masculine identity that is essentially exchangeable and transactional. These bodies are capitalist commodities, fundamentally interchangable and asserting the same bundle of ideological traits. The technology of digital facial replacement allows creators to visualize this exchange value. As opposed to the pornographic, invasive, and misogynistic face swap videos originally posted on reddit.com by user ‘deepfakes’ in 2017, the facial replacement videos found on YouTube are more playful in nature, imagining alternate histories and using face swapping as a mode of comedy. This case study of 1980s action stars opens up to a broader examination of issues of identity in digital facial replacement. In the videos under analysis, gender swaps are rela...
Animation
Over the last two decades, the technologies of performance capture and robotic surgery have incre... more Over the last two decades, the technologies of performance capture and robotic surgery have increased in both use and visibility. While these technologies might initially seem quite dissimilar, they each produce a human–machine assemblage that enacts itself across different scales. Each technology ‘captures’ a performance, translates that performance into digital information, and recodes that performance into another body. This article argues that both performance capture and remote surgery penetrate the materiality of the body and reconstitute that materiality elsewhere, as a human’s bodily movements are captured, transmitted, translated, and finally recoded into that of another body, be it an analogue or digital form of embodiment. The shift in scale produced by each technology – in terms of movement, perception, experience, and sensation – demonstrates the extent to which these technologies of telepresence foster a multilocal experience of the body, the dispersion of authorial control across the human–machine assemblage, and a reinforcement of embodied experience despite an embrace of cultural fantasies of the disembodiment of information. This article takes an explicitly phenomenological position, examining the connective tissue that binds actor and avatar, surgeon and robot. The ligaments that connect human and nonhuman both separate and draw the entities close together, and this article explores the resultant shifts in scale, perception, and experience engendered by performance capture and robotic surgery.
Film Criticism, Mar 22, 2008
Configurations, 2011
In DNA portraits, a visualization of a DNA sample—an “inner” structure comes to stand in for the ... more In DNA portraits, a visualization of a DNA sample—an “inner” structure comes to stand in for the individual represented in the portrait. This essay places DNA portraits within an intellectual approach to photography that regards the photographic process as a technique by which the invisible inside might be made material in the photographic image. DNA portraits do not share the same mode of production as photographic portraiture, and yet, despite significant technological and cultural shifts, the nineteenth-century image vernaculars survive within these twenty-first-century visual objects. DNA portraits point toward a larger cultural concern enabled by the genomic revolution: that of the ability of DNA to function as a material expression of some internal essence. DNA portraits also rely on computing and information-processing technologies, exposing the extent to which they draw on a framework of understanding that regards biological material in terms of bits of computing data.
Uploads
Books by Drew Ayers
Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.
Publisher Website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/spectacular-posthumanism-9781501340086/
Preview: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5ca77cd25f15030001900ebb
Journal Articles by Drew Ayers
Book Chapters by Drew Ayers
Papers by Drew Ayers
Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.
Publisher Website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/spectacular-posthumanism-9781501340086/
Preview: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5ca77cd25f15030001900ebb