"3D cinema is often maligned by viewers and critics but, as Nick Jones argues, it is a central feature of contemporary cinema and our current visual landscape. Instead of seeing it as merely an augmentation of 2D cinema, Nick Jones offers a critical history and analysis of 3D cinema that views it as a distinctive media form. 3D cinema is not only a technology used in both blockbuster and avant-garde films but as a tool for producing, controlling, and distorting space, Jones analyzes how 3D has also become a part of contemporary systems of surveillance, attention management, and militarized spatial control. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and cultural contexts, emphasizing how the production of space experienced in 3D addresses a range of other discourses around spatial representation. Jones argues that 3D cinema represents space in ways that can be read as mapped and monstrous. Mapped, because digital 3D relies on precision-tooled image management to create digitized renderings of space in which all dimensions and actions are quantified and geolocated; and monstrous, because 3D cinema is an acutely immersive media form which destabilizes distinctions between observed image and lived-in space. The first half of the book covers the history of 3D cinema, the way 3D has been approached by film theory, the digital contexts of contemporary 3D production, and the relationship between planar (2D) images and the stereoscopic spaces of 3D. The book's second part connects digital 3D with the development of immersive virtual reality technologies, the rise of globe-spanning computer telecommunication networks, and the shifting nature of the screen in the contemporary new media landscape"--