Jacob Smith

Vertical Cities explores how skyscrapers can evolve into self-sufficient ecosystems, transforming urban living through sustainable urban development. The book argues that integrating residential spaces, workplaces, and green environments into high-rise buildings is crucial for accommodating growing populations while minimizing our environmental impact. It highlights the potential of vertical farms and mixed-use environments, suggesting that skyscrapers can become more than just commercial monuments. The book delves into integrating sustainable technologies like renewable energy and efficient waste management into architectural design. It examines creating functional, mixed-use spaces and fostering community within vertical structures. Drawing from architectural plans, environmental assessments, and sociological studies, Vertical Cities analyzes existing and proposed projects, acknowledging both successes and challenges. Structured in three parts, the book introduces the concept of vertical cities, examines key elements of self-sufficiency, and explores the social dimensions of vertical communities. This approach makes it valuable for architects, urban planners, and anyone interested in the future of architecture and environmental sustainability.

Vertical Cities

The negative environmental effects of media culture are not often acknowledged: the fuel required to keep huge server farms in operation, landfills full of high tech junk, and the extraction of rare minerals for devices reliant on them are just some of the hidden costs of the contemporary mediascape. Eco-Sonic Media brings an ecological critique to the history of sound media technologies in order to amplify the environmental undertones in sound studies and turn up the audio in discussions of greening the media. By looking at early and neglected forms of sound technology, Jacob Smith seeks to create a revisionist, ecologically aware history of sound media. Delving into the history of pre-electronic media like hand-cranked gramophones, comparatively eco-friendly media artifacts such as the shellac discs that preceded the use of petroleum-based vinyl, early forms of portable technology like divining rods, and even the use of songbirds as domestic music machines, Smith builds a scaffolding of historical case studies to demonstrate how Ògreen media archaeologyÓ can make sound studies vibrate at an ecological frequency while opening the ears of eco-criticism. Throughout this eye-opening and timely book he makes readers more aware of the costs and consequences of their personal media consumption by prompting comparisons with non-digital, non-electronic technologies and by offering different ways in which sound media can become eco-sonic media. In the process, he forges interdisciplinary connections, opens new avenues of research, and poses fresh theoretical questions for scholars and students of media, sound studies, and contemporary environmental history.

Eco-Sonic Media

Natasha Whearity

Olivia Rhodes

Louise Aust

Savneet Singh

Jay Crosbie

Sarah Tryon

Natalia Alyukova

Bob Woolman

Courtney Askey

Chloe Rose

Ari Francis

Kieran Muggleton

Siddh Bhatnagar

We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

This entertaining and innovative book focuses on vocal performance styles that developed in tandem with the sound technologies of the photograph, radio, and sound film. It looks at these media technologies and industries through the lens of performance, bringing to light a nexus of performer, technology, and audience.

Performance and Sound Media

Vocal Tracks

When I Close My Eyes and Think of You, You’re All My Favorite Colors is an exploration into the feelings and ideas I had during a very sporadic year. I used this book to both express the joy I have felt and to cope with hardships and anxiety during the not-so-fun parts. I hope you, as the reader, can relate to this collection of poems in a way that brings you back to good times or helps you feel less alone in the bad ones. The themes of nature, color, the body, and anxiety are prevalent throughout the collection and weave a narrative of how I see the world. I hope you enjoy it!

When I Close My Eyes and Think of You, You’Re All My Favorite Colors

"Starring human flies, daredevil aviators, bridge jumpers, and lion tamers, The Thrill Makers is a great read, as evocative as it is theoretically savvy, and convincingly argued. Culling telling details from a host of long-overlooked sources, Jacob Smith's account of sensational, high-risk public performance from the Victorian age to the 1930s unearths and illuminates the interwoven histories of public spectacle, masculinity, the motion picture industry, new forms of celebrity, and the expanding American metropolis."--Greg Waller, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. "The Thrill Makers is an historical tour-de-force that illuminates the origins of risk-taking performance in American entertainment, and shows how its practitioners were gradually marginalized as invisible stunt doubles during the rise of the motion picture industry. Smith's analysis of the lion tamer, the human fly, and the airplane wing-walker--as well as the many others who thrilled audiences before and during the advent of cinema--inspires us to reconsider the nature of media spectacle, masculinity, performance, celebrity, and labor at the turn of the last century. Impeccably researched, this book is a captivating read that re-frames the emergence of cinema in the context of its relationship to other forms of modern entertainment."--Barbara Klinger, author of Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home.

Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance

The Thrill Makers

Neil Verma

"This collection of essays examines one of the most important, yet understudied, media authors of all time--Norman Corwin--using him as a critical lens to consider the history of multimedia authorship, particularly in the realm of sound. Known for seven decades as the 'poet laureate' of radio, Corwin is most famous for his radio dramas, which reached tens of millions of listeners around the world and contributed to radio drama's success as a mass media form in the 1930s and 1940s. But Corwin was a pioneer in multiple media, including cinema, theater, TV, public service broadcasting, journalism, and even cantata. In each of these areas, Corwin had a distinctive approach to sonic aesthetics and mastery of multiple aspects of media production, relying in part on his inventive atmospheric effects in the studio both prerecorded, and, more impressively, live in real time. From the front lines of World War II to his role as Chief of Special Projects for United Nations Radio and his influence on media today, the political and social aspect of Corwin's work is woven into these essays. With a foreword by Michele Hilmes and contributions from Thomas Doherty, Mary Ann Watson, Shawn VanCour, David Ossman and others, this volume cements Corwin's reputation as perhaps the greatest writer in the history of radio, while also showing that his long career is a neglected model of multimedia authorship."--Provided by publisher.

Norman Corwin and Media Authorship

Anatomy of Sound

Well before Evel Knievel or Hollywood stuntmen, reality television or the X Games, North America had a long tradition of stunt performance, of men (and some women) who sought media attention and popular fame with public feats of daring. Many of these feats—jumping off bridges, climbing steeples and buildings, swimming incredible distances, or doing tricks with wild animals—had their basis in the manual trades or in older entertainments like the circus. In The Thrill Makers, Jacob Smith shows how turn-of-the-century bridge jumpers, human flies, lion tamers, and stunt pilots first drew crowds to their spectacular displays of death-defying action before becoming a crucial, yet often invisible, component of Hollywood film stardom. Smith explains how these working-class stunt performers helped shape definitions of American manhood, and pioneered a form of modern media celebrity that now occupies an increasingly prominent place in our contemporary popular culture.

This entertaining and innovative book focuses on vocal performance styles that developed in tandem with the sound technologies of the phonograph, radio, and sound film. Writing in a clear and lively style, Jacob Smith looks at these media technologies and industries through the lens of performance, bringing to light a fascinating nexus of performer, technology, and audience. Combining theories of film sound, cultural histories of sound technologies and industries, and theories of performance, Smith convincingly connects disparate and largely neglected performance niches to explore the development of a modern vocal performance. Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media demonstrates the voice to be a vehicle of performance, identity, and culture and illustrates both the interconnection of all these categories and their relation to the media technologies of the past century.

When we are stressed with a problem, writing it all down can help with identifying the causing factor. Writing things done can help alleviate the difficulties you are creating inside your head and move to a healthier life.

Lined Paper Diary for Self Therapy

One Day You Will Look Back and See That All Along You Were Blooming

The negative environmental effects of media culture are not often acknowledged: the fuel required to keep huge server farms in operation, landfills full of high tech junk, and the extraction of rare minerals for devices reliant on them are just some of the hidden costs of the contemporary mediascape. Eco-Sonic Media brings an ecological critique to the history of sound media technologies in order to amplify the environmental undertones in sound studies and turn up the audio in discussions of greening the media. By looking at early and neglected forms of sound technology, Jacob Smith seeks to create a revisionist, ecologically aware history of sound media. Delving into the history of pre-electronic media like hand-cranked gramophones, comparatively eco-friendly media artifacts such as the shellac discs that preceded the use of petroleum-based vinyl, early forms of portable technology like divining rods, and even the use of songbirds as domestic music machines, Smith builds a scaffolding of historical case studies to demonstrate how “green media archaeology” can make sound studies vibrate at an ecological frequency while opening the ears of eco-criticism. Throughout this eye-opening and timely book he makes readers more aware of the costs and consequences of their personal media consumption by prompting comparisons with non-digital, non-electronic technologies and by offering different ways in which sound media can become eco-sonic media. In the process, he forges interdisciplinary connections, opens new avenues of research, and poses fresh theoretical questions for scholars and students of media, sound studies, and contemporary environmental history.

Jacob Smith

Books

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