Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today’s media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.

Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp’s inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the “trained eye” of art history.

Contributors:
Rudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Leonardo (Series) (Cambridge, Mass.)
ISBN 0262072793, 9780262072793
Length 475 pages

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The book “Kineticism: Kinetics in fine arts – color music” from the pioneer of light-kinetic art.

Edited by Josef Vydra
Publisher: Česká grafická unie, Prague, October 1941
Edice výtvarné výchovy, svazek 8
144 pages

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A compilation of writings and debates from the Nettime newsgroup and internet mailing list. This book documents the debates over emerging media technologies that are currently reshaping society. What are the liberatory potentials? Where are the points of political conflict and class struggle in this new culture? What are the pitfalls of new technology? Read Me! provides the beginnings of this discussion and an outline for what has become a continuing forum on the Net.

Edited by Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding
Publisher: Autonomedia (February, 1999)
ISBN: 1570270899, 978-1570270895
556 pages

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Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms — both biological and social — Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life. With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on “The Rhythmanalysis Project” and “Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Towns.”

Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore
With an Introduction by Stuart Elden
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004
Athlone contemporary European thinkers
ISBN 0826472990, 9780826472991
Length 112 pages

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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