We're experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists' close readings of contemporary media with scientists' discussions of the science and math that inform them.

This text includes contributions by established and emerging scholars performing across-the-aisle research on new technologies, exploring topics such as facial and gait recognition; EEG and audiovisual materials; surveillance; and sound and images in relation to questions of sexual identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and class and includes examples from a range of films and TV shows including Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Morgan, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Through a variety of critical, theoretical, proprioceptive, and speculative lenses, the collection facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration and provides readers with ways of responding to these new technologies.

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and Studying Twentieth Century Music (2021) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017) and Transmedia Directors (2019).

Selmin Kara is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD University, Canada. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and ecological imaginary in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary.

Jonathan Leal is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, USA. A native of the South Texas borderlands, he studies and creates music and narrative across sonic, visual, and textual media to unpack the legacies of colonialism in and beyond the U.S. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, a compilation album celebrating the Rio Grande Valley's musical geographies, as well as Futuro Conjunto, a transmedia, Chicanx speculative fiction album named one of the best Latinx releases of 2020 by Pitchfork and Texas Highways magazines.