Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies: Animation, the Body, and Affect

The book seeks to examine the ways that digital information technologies influence human perception and experience. Contemporary computational media increasingly govern our experience through their capacity for externalizing our knowledge and memories, mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, and also by creating affective encounters such as emotionally rewarding sensory pleasure. Computational platforms and software have become essential to contemporary everyday life and are now almost impossible to eliminate.

In this light, it can be argued that the computational media embedded environment is becoming inseparable from embodied human experience. Thus, it can be said that human perception is becoming a product of human-machine symbiosis in a new type of media ecology. In this context, the body becomes a crucial techno-bio entity, which mediates between human perception and machine interaction. Here, affect has become a useful analytical notion with which to explore the dynamism between biological bodily responses and conscious-nonconscious neurodynamic processes. This book, then, aims to avoid overemphasizing or underestimating both neuroreductionism and biological determinism to better understand affective perception of digital moving images.

The book will be useful for postgraduate students and researchers who are working on: media and communication theory, film and animation studies, visual culture, science, and technology studies, affect theory, the body and digital humanities.