Toni Pape

The Aesthetics of Stealth (eBook, ePUB)

Digital Culture, Video Games, and the Politics of Perception

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How performances of tactical imperceptibility-or "stealth"-have become a key political practice in digital culture as a means of escaping surveillance and tracking technologies. In The Aesthetics of Stealth, Toni Pape proposes the first aesthetic and cultural theory of stealth, a mode of political action. The primary goal of stealth is to act efficiently while remaining imperceptible. Pape begins with the observation that the desire for stealth is a sociocultural response to digital media culture, due to digital technologies' unprecedented ability to track individual behavior. He argues that stealth operates as a cross-media aesthetic that can be observed in video games, television, and video art alike, particularly in so-called stealth video games, a genre that requires players to accomplish missions without being detected by in-game enemies. Drawing on theories of perception, digital aesthetics, and video game studies, Pape proposes an analytical map of different modes of stealth such as "sneaking stealth," "social stealth," or "magical stealth." The author's findings are brought into dialogue with research in the fields of software studies, surveillance studies, and political theory to establish the political importance of stealth. While stealth is a resistance to pervasive sensing and tracking, Pape also shows that the principles of stealth politics are closely connected to urgent concerns like (cyber)warfare and other digital practices of targeting and surveillance that operate to entrench cultural values like heteronormativity and white supremacy.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Oktober 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780262380775
• Artikelnr.: 69763637

Autorenporträt

Toni Pape is a cultural theorist and media scholar at the University of Amsterdam. His previous books include Figures of Time and the coauthored Nocturnal Fabulations. He is a member of the editorial boards of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and the Immediations book series at Punctum Press.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
1   Stealth Parade: Introduction, Overview, Problematization
2   Digital Prehensions: Two Brief Genealogies of Stealth
3   Stealth: A Co-evolution of Technology and Culture
4   Technostealth: A Baroque Disposition
5   The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then: An Interlude
6   Sneaking Stealth: The Tracking Shot and Relational Imperceptibility
7   Surveillance Stealth 1: Conspiracy Thinking and Ubiquitous War
8   Surveillance Stealth 2: Overcoding World History and the World as
Blackbox
9   Magical Stealth: Queering Sourcery and Relational Ethics in Dishonored
10   Social Stealth: Camp Aesthetic, Whiteness, and Artificial Stupidity in
Hitman
11   Stealthy Together: Coda on Insistent Belonging
Notes
Works Cited
Index