AltArt Foundation: Bare Share. Culture of File Sharing in Romania (2007)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · filesharing, network culture, p2p, romania, software
The exhibition contained the works of largely anonymous artists and some of the best known – active in the digital space. The territory researched is the DC++-based neighborhood networks – providers of an endemic culture where the act of sharing is the prototypical contract of participating in this culture. Sharing while not expecting immediate gratification make neighborhood networks complex gift economies – where the community becomes an entity, the real gifting partner – playing the role of the donor and recipient in the same time.
This ideology of exchange – regardless of legal issues or moral concerns – builds a subculture of consumption that is maintained through giving. Gifting becomes a tool for the collapse of the permission-culture-based capitalist market hegemony while it is serving as an alternative consumption activity at the electronic frontier.
Curators: Istvan Szakáts, Stefan Tiron
Project by AltArt Foundation
AltArt Foundation: E-Tribal Art (2009)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · art, e-tribes, global village, media
The project brings together 12 international artists to test new ways of reaching electronic tribes with their work.
Editors: Alina Suatean, Corina Bucea
Curators: István Szakáts, Thomas Dumke
Project manager: Rarita Zbranca
Project by AltArt Foundation, Cluj, and British Council
Partners: c6.org, European Alternatives, GMT+2 Foundation, InterSpace
Funded by Romanian Cultural Institute through Cantemir Programme.
Hans van Maanen: How to Study Art Worlds. On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Values (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · actor-network-theory, aesthetics, art theory, autopoiesis, institutional critique, sociology, sociology of art
This necessary and thought-provoking study brings together the organisational side of the world of the arts and the understanding of the many functions art fulfi lls in our culture. The author sets out to establish how the organisation of art worlds serves the functioning of the arts in society. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents a comparative study of approaches to the art world as practiced by Dickie, Becker, Bourdieu, Heinich, and Luhmann, among others. The second part focuses on the philosphical debates concerning ‘aesthetic experience’. Besides Kant, scholars such as Gadamer, Foster, Shustermann, Schaeffer and Carroll come to the fore. In the third part, the author traces the consequences of these theoretical approaches for the organization of art world practices.
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2010
ISBN 9089641521, 9789089641526
Length 256 pages
tripleC journal: Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture, Vol 8, No 2 (2010)
Filed under journal | Tags: · capitalism, communication, financial crisis, information society, information technology, media
The worldwide economic downturn is indicative for a new large crisis of capitalism. The future of capitalism is in this situation not determined, but depends on collective human agency. This introduction to the special issue of tripleC on “Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture” presents general arguments about the crisis, a general model of the political economy of capitalist communication, and a systematic typology of literature about capitalist crisis & communication. The introduced model of the political economy of capitalist communication is comprised of seven interconnected moments: 1) the media content industry, 2) the media infrastructure industry, 3) the interaction of the media economy and the non-media economy, 4) the interaction of the finance sector and the media economy, 5) alternative media, 6) media reception, 7) media prosumption. The model is used for classifying actual and potential research about the communicative dimension of the new capitalist crisis.
tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information
Society 8 (2): 193-309.
Editors: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen.
Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“.
tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X)
All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License.
Marcus Foth: Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, mobile technology, urban informatics, urban studies, urbanism
Alive with movement and excitement, cities transmit a rapid flow of exchange facilitated by a meshwork of infrastructure connections. In this environment, the Internet has advanced to become the prime communication medium, creating a vibrant and increasingly researched field of study in urban informatics.
Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation brings together an international selection of 66 esteemed scholars presenting their research and development on urban technology, digital cities, locative media, and mobile and wireless applications. A truly global resource, this one-of-a-kind reference collection contains significant and timely research covering a diverse range of current issues in the urban informatics field, making it an essential addition to technology and social science collections in academic libraries that will benefit scholars and practitioners in an array of fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.
Publisher IGI Global snippet, 2009
ISBN 160566152X, 9781605661520
Length 470 pages
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Mary Joyce (ed.): Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, facebook, mass media, media activism, social movements, twitter, web 2.0
The media have recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change—from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American nonprofits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters.
These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but the underlying mechanics of the practice of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.
Topics include:
* how to think about digital activism
* the digital activism environment: infrastructure, social, political, and economic factors
* digital activism practices: two research perspectives and the danger of destructive activism
* digital activism’s value: balancing optimism and pessimism
* building the future of digital activism
Publisher: International Debate Education Association, New York, June 2010
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License BY-NC 3.0 US.
ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3
228 pages
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Felicity Colman (ed.): Film, Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema, philosophy, theory
Thoroughly intertwined, film and philosophy have a complex relationship between thought and perception, time and memory, as well as social, political, and aesthetic experiences. Philosophy has underpinned the creation of cinema while cinema, in turn, has redefined philosophical categories, rethought sex, gender, time and space, and created new concepts that illuminate phenomenology, metaphysics, and epistemology.
An ideal introduction for students, Film, Theory and Philosophy brings together leading scholars to provide a clear, detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. From continental philosophers to analytical philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, the essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But most importantly, the essays explore how cinema has shaped contemporary philosophy and how philosophy has led to a reappraisal of film. This collection will prove an invaluable reference and guide to readers interested in a deeper understanding of the issues and insights presented by the philosophy of film.
Publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009
ISBN 0773537007, 9780773537002
Length 404 pages
David Campany: Photography and Cinema (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, history of cinema, image, photography
What did the arrival of cinema do for photography? How did the moving image change our relation to the still image? Why have cinema and photography been so drawn to each other? Close-ups, freeze frames and the countless portrayals of photographers on screen are signs of cinema’s enduring attraction to the still image. Photo-stories, sequences and staged tableaux speak of the deep influence of cinema on photography.
Photography and Cinema a considers the importance of the still image for filmmakers such as the Lumière brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Mark Lewis, Agnès Varda, Peter Weir, Christopher Nolan and many others. In parallel it looks at the cinematic in the work of photographers and artists that include Germaine Krull, William Klein, John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman.
From film stills and flipbooks to slide shows and digital imaging, hybrid visual forms have established an ambiguous realm between motion and stillness. David Campany assembles a missing history in which photography and cinema have been each other’s muse and inspiration for over a century.
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2008
Exposures (London)
ISBN 1861893515, 9781861893512
Length 160 pages
Anthony Dunne: Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (1999/2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, electromagnetism, industrial design, radio, semiotics, technology
As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from “intelligent” toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the “electrosphere” in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.
The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, “mixing criticism with optimism.” Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include “Electroclimates,” animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; “When Objects Dream…,” consumer products that “dream” in electromagnetic waves; “Thief of Affection,” which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; “Tuneable Cities,” which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the “Faraday Chair: Negative Radio,” enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield.
Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: “Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable.” His project and proposals challenge it to do so.
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262042320, 9780262042321
Length 174 pages
Agnieszka Pokrywka: New Media Art in Central and Eastern Europe in the 2000s (2009) [Polish]
Filed under thesis | Tags: · 2000s, east-central europe, media art, network society, new media art
The thesis is a presentation and analysis of contemporary new media art in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of history (soviet times) and current situation (network society). First chapter of this work is focused on the issues mentioned above, simultaneously being kind of theoretical introduction to the concepts of Central and Eastern Europe, network society or new media art which are closely related to the technological revolution. Second chapter is kind of fusion between mentioned above subjects which apparently seem to be very different and discordant but in fact they’re deeply connected and dependent. Analysis of them allow us to understand correctly and truly realities of new media art origins in Central Eastern Europe. Comprehending of these terms became to be a necessary base for analysis technologically based art in the context of European (Chapter Three) and global (Chapter Four) networks of media creativity. Speaking generally, what has been discussed theoretically in the first part of this work is supplemented by specific examples in the second half which is showing different networks focused on organization, theory, practice of technological art. Complex and variable networks of new media art centers were visualized as a CEEMAC2000+ map (Appendix 3). The main aim of this thesis is to underline historical, political and economical influence on new media art development in Central Eastern Europe.
Master of Arts thesis
Dept of Art Criticism and Promotion, Poznan Academy of Fine Arts, 2009
Supervisor: Professor Grzegorz Dziamski
Length: 111 pages
Published under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Poland
Adrian Johns: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, intellectual property, piracy
Since the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.
Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent: in the wars over piracy, it is the victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages.
Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-226-40118-8, 0-226-40118-9
Length 626 pages
Thomas Elsaesser, Malte Hagener: Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, history of cinema
What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? That is the central question for film theory, and renowned film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener use this question to guide students through all of the major film theories—from the classical period to today—in this insightful, engaging book. Every kind of cinema (and film theory) imagines an ideal spectator, and then imagines a certain relationship between the mind and body of that spectator and the screen. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from ‘exterior’ to ‘interior’ relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from 1945 to the present, from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, ‘apparatus’, phenomenological and cognitivist theories.
Publisher Taylor & Francis Group, 2010
ISBN 041580101X, 9780415801010
Length 222 pages
Jack Burnham: Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968)
Filed under book | Tags: · art and technology, art history, art theory, kinetic art, machine, sculpture, technology
Examines the materialistic and psychological factors responsible for dominant trends in twentieth-century sculpture.
At least 50 reviews of BMS have been published. Some of those appearing in art periodicals were by Jay Jacobs in Art in America, page 113 (January 1969); separate reviews by Albert Elsen and Walter Darby Bannard in Artforum, pages 68-71 (May 1969); by Jay Lobell in Arts, page 10 (November 1968); and by Jonathan Benthall in Studio International, pages 148+ (March 1969). The final two sections of BMS were put online by James Coupe at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (University of Washington) under the title “The Future of Responsive Systems”. Another group of excerpts in English and translated into Dutch have been put online by “Laat op de avond…” a TV program about tech-culture and politics broadcast on VPRO in the Netherlands.
Publisher George Braziller, Inc., New York, 1968
ISBN: 0807607150, 978-0807607152
Length 402 pages
Matthew Biro: The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, avantgarde, berlin, cyborgs, dada, germany, weimar
Finding the cyborg in early twentieth-century German art
In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.
In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic.
Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816636206, 9780816636204
Length 318 pages
Cristina Venegas: Digital Dilemmas: The State, The Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, cuba, film, internet, youtube
The contentious debate in Cuba over Internet use and digital media primarily focuses on three issues—maximizing the potential for economic and cultural development, establishing stronger ties to the outside world, and changing the hierarchy of control. A growing number of users decry censorship and insist on personal freedom in accessing the web, while the centrally managed system benefits the government in circumventing U.S. sanctions against the country and in controlling what limited capacity exists.
Digital Dilemmas views Cuba from the Soviet Union’s demise to the present, to assess how conflicts over media access play out in their both liberating and repressive potential. Drawing on extensive scholarship and interviews, Cristina Venegas questions myths of how Internet use necessarily fosters global democracy and reveals the impact of new technologies on the country’s governance and culture. She includes film in the context of broader media history, as well as artistic practices such as digital art and networks of diasporic communities connected by the Web. This book is a model for understanding the geopolitic location of power relations in the age of digital information sharing.
Publisher Rutgers University Press, 2010
New Directions in International Studies
ISBN 0813546877, 9780813546872
Length 229 pages
