Sensations of History

"‘Time,’ wrote Gilles Deleuze, ‘takes thought.’ Sensations of History brilliantly lays out a new domain of temporal analysis, tracking how mediatic dimensions of time are at once enmeshed in and explicated by events of history. In a tour de force analysis of what can only be sensed in animation, James J. Hodge lets the other shoe drop: ‘History now takes animation.’"—Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology

"Sensations of History challenges common claims about the ahistorical tendencies of media, contending that digital artifacts are crucial to understanding historical experience in the twenty-first century. James J. Hodge supports this argument through original analyses of computational artworks, spambots, videogames, machinima films, and e-poetry. Throughout this book, thought-provoking encounters with digital media are also attempts to face a history characterized by deep opacity and multilayered ambivalence."—Patrick Jagoda, author of Network Aesthetics

"In a sophisticated and much-needed challenge to entrenched notions that digital media is ahistorical, James J. Hodge urges readers to address digital inscription as ‘digital experience,’ contending that we urgently need to understand digital media’s fundamental transformation of history as an opportunity rather than a loss—as an aesthetic enrichment and sensory intensification of historical experience itself."—Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke University

"In Hodge’s view, the old and the new do not belong to the same category, perhaps not even to the same world: the digital is not the antithesis of the old, it is really something different. The superbly analyzed new media art examples demonstrate though that these various and contradictory sensations and experiences of history do not end up in silence of muteness. Humans adapt to the technological world which is always ‘already there’ and they ceaselessly express, reshape, and reinvent their being in time."—Leonardo Reviews

"Balancing this interdisciplinary scope with precise theoretical interventions, and doing so in a manner that is consistently rigorous, engaging, and accessible, it is not exaggerated to say that this is a truly profound step towards the articulation of a much needed theory of the historical aesthetics of encounter."—Critical Inquiry

"Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art is a theoretically intense reading of contemporary scholarship on digital media, animation, inscription, and the meanings of historical experience."—Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 

"Hodge provides a detailed roadmap for future scholarship, not only on history and “new” media, but also and more generally on the complex intersections of computational processes and human experiences."—InVisible Culture