Compact Disc (Paperback)

Robert Barry

ISBN 10: 1501348515 / ISBN 13: 9781501348518

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, New York, 2020

About this Item

Paperback. Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. "The compact disc promised to be the perfect medium for recorded sound, but it presaged the end of physical media for good. Its history shows that the materiality of media can never simply be wished away."-- Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781501348518

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Compact Disc (Paperback)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, New York
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501348515
• ISBN 13: 9781501348518
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning.

Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About the Authors

Robert Barry is Visual Arts Editor at The Quietus and a Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London, UK. He is the author of The Music of the Future (2017) and co-editor, with Houman Barekat and David Winters, of The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online (2017).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).