Media Heterotopias

"Hye Jean Chung's ambitious and provocative project provides a multilevel account that synthesizes issues of disruptive digital ‘workflows,’ with Foucault's theory, and a prescient account of globalization in order to demonstrate how each works at the close-up level of the composited film text. This is the rare production studies book that avoids the traps of trade-speak, even as it makes theory and culture inextricable from our understanding of industry." — John T. Caldwell, author of Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television

"Following Foucault's notion of 'heterotopia,'of topoi or even utopoi composed of multiple platforms layered and contested that are rendered into a single, phantasmatic whole, Hye Jean Chung proposes 'media heterotopias' as a way to understand the infusion of digital effects in contemporary cinema. At the heart of her analysis lies an affective paradox that transforms complexity, distortion, and incongruity in digital cinemas into the narcotic illusion of 'seamlessness.' At once erudite, rigorous, and highly speculative, Chung's contribution to the scholarship on digital cinemas suggests a frenzy of incoherence driving the soothing surfaces of digital effects and the labor that generates them." — Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift