Oliver Grau (ed.): MediaArtHistories (2007)

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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Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime (1999)

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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W. J. Thomas Mitchell: Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1987)

Mitchell undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1987
ISBN 0226532291, 9780226532295
Length 226 pages

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Susan Sontag: On Photography (1977/2005)

One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave” essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”

Publisher Rosetta Books, New York, 2005
ISBN 0-7953-2699-8

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Nicholas Gane, David Beer: New Media: The Key Concepts (2008)

Digital media are rapidly changing the world in which we live. Global communications, mobile interfaces and Internet cultures are re-configuring our everyday lives and experiences.

To understand these changes, a new theoretical imagination is needed, one that is informed by a conceptual vocabulary that is able to cope with the daunting complexity of the world today. This book draws on writings by leading social and cultural theorists to assemble this vocabulary.

It addresses six key concepts that are pivotal for understanding the impact of new media on contemporary society and culture: information, network, interface, interactivity, archive and simulation. Each concept is considered through a range of concrete examples to illustrate how they might be developed and used as research tools. An inter-disciplinary approach is taken that spans a number of fields, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies and computer science.

Publisher Berg, 2008
ISBN 1845201337, 9781845201333
Length 149 pages

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Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture – 1st free issue (2009)

We commence publication of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture with a special issue on what we believe is a matter of considerable interest. It begins with a question: ‘Do recent developments in the media – convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0 in short, mean that we need to reassess how we think about the media, how we research into it and how we write and teach about it?’ The guest editor, Paul Taylor, has assembled a very serious and lively exploration of the notion of Media Studies 2.0 which we hope, and fully expect, will lead to further discussion in these pages and elsewhere.

Now to move on to our overall publishing policy: this will be a eneralist journal. It is our intention to publish the best work from the widest possible range, by subject matter and by approach: theoretical, empirical and historical of current research in communication and culture. Sometimes, as here, issues will be themed, others will be more general so that in the round, over time, our pages will address all interests. Our subject matter will be international, as will our contributors and we welcome submissions from both better and lesser known academics and departments. We will return to important topics with the intention of establishing informed, scholarly  conversations on matters of note. As in the best fiction, our ournal will have multiple storylines, and like good Cubists we will look at our subject from every possible angle.

Contents:

Editorial
Authors: Anthony McNicholas, Tarik Sabry, Mascha Brichta, Alessandro D’Arma, Daniel Day, Janne Halttu, Sofia Johansson, Salvo Scifo, Burcu Sumer and Xin Xin

Editorial introduction – Optimism, pessimism and the myth of technological neutrality
Authors: Paul A. Taylor

Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline
Authors: William Merrin

Critical Media Studies 2.0: an interactive upgrade
Authors: Mark Andrejevic

Beyond mediation: thinking the computer otherwise
Authors: David J. Gunkel

Sounds like teen spirit: iTunes U, podcasting and a sonic education
Authors: Tara Brabazon

Critical theory 2.0 and im/materiality: the bug in the machinic flows
Authors: Dr Paul A. Taylor

Audience Studies 2.0. On the theory, politics and method of qualitative audience research
Authors: Joke Hermes

Straw men or cyborgs?
Authors: Professor Jonathan Dovey and Emeritus Professor Martin Lister

Media Studies 2.0: a response
Authors: David Gauntlett

Review
Authors: Tero Karppi

Print ISSN: 1757-2681

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Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (2003)

According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities, user groups, social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), artists, and cultural critics into the core of Internet development.

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers’ groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control.

The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for all, the rise and fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable social networks, the fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies of Internet activists, mailing list culture, and collaborative text filtering. Stressing the importance of intercultural collaboration, Lovink includes reports from Albania, where NGOs and artists use new media to combat the country’s poverty and isolation; from Taiwan, where the September 1999 earthquake highlighted the cultural politics of the Internet; and from Delhi, where a new media center explores free software, public access, and Hindi interfaces.

Publisher    MIT Press, 2003
ISBN    0262621800, 9780262621809
Length    394 pages

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Zuzana Husárová: Písanie v interaktívnych médiách. Digitálna fikcia (2009) [Slovak]

Predmetom dizertačnej práce je predstavenie a kontextualizácia možností písania v interaktívnych médiách a skúmanie literárneho umenia interaktívnych médií v anglofónnom priestore. Pre dnešnú tvorbu umeleckých diel v interaktívnych médiách je príznačný intermediálny charakter; autori pre predstavenie fiktívneho sveta často prepájajú text, obraz a zvuk do výpovedného celku. Cieľom práce je vyjadriť sa jednak k otázkam, ktoré síce nie sú nové, avšak digitálny formát a priestor internetu im umožnili nadobudnúť nové rozmery a aj k otázkam pre výskum digitálnej fikcie špecifickým. Výskum sa zameriava na digitálnu fikciu – v počítačovom programe napísané digitálne dielo, v ktorom autor ponúka svet fikcie. V práci sú predstavené viaceré aspekty digitálnej fikcie, ktorých kombinácia je indikátorom jej charakteristického postavenia v rámci ostatného digitálneho umenia – fragmentárnosť rozprávania, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamika, intermedialita a princípy hry a hravosti. Fenoménmi súčasnosti, ktoré pôsobia aj na tvorbu skúmaných diel a ich čitateľskú popularitu sú estetická atraktivita, ktorú v tomto kontexte prináša predovšetkým využitie diverzity medialít a pokus o vyvolanie čo najintenzívnejšieho zážitku v čo najkratšom čase. Práca pozostáva okrem úvodu, záveru a interlúdia (venovanému kategórii materiality digitálnej fikcie) zo štyroch kľúčových kapitol. V týchto kapitolách sú vedecké prístupy k skúmanej problematike písania v interaktívnych médiách následne využité pri analýze-interpretácii konkrétnych digitálnych fikcií.

Kľúčové slová : digitálna fikcia, interaktívne médiá, fragmentárnosť, multilinearita, interaktivita, performativita, dynamickosť, intermedialita, hra, literárna veda, teória nových médií, teória digitálnej fikcie, hypertext, kybertext, materialita, metamedialita

Dizertačná práca
Ústav svetovej literatúry Slovenskej akadémie vied v Bratislave
Školiteľ: Mgr. Bogumiła Suwara, PhD.
Bratislava: ÚSvL SAV, 2009
Dizajn: Pavlinka Morháčová

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Writing in the interactive media. Digital fiction
The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play. The current phenomena that influence also the creation of the analysed art pieces and their popularity among readers are the aesthetic attraction, in this context brought mainly by the use of media diversity, and the effort to evoke the most intensive experience in the shortest time span. The thesis consists apart from the introduction, conclusion and interludium (dealing with the materiality of digital fiction) of four chapters. The scientific approaches to the problematics of writing in the interactive media are in the second parts of these chapters used in the process of analysis-interpretation of particular digital fiction pieces.

Key words : digital fiction, interactive media, fragmentarity, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality, play, game, literary science, new media theory, digital fiction theory, hypertext, cybertext, materiality, metamediality

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Friedrich A. Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986/1999)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle’s eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.

Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler’s discourse analysis of the 1980’s and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990’s.

Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732337, 9780804732338
Length 315 pages
Originally published in German in 1986 as Grammophon Film Typewriter by Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin

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Joost Van Loon: Media Technology: Critical Perspectives (2007)

What are media? Why are more and more objects being turned into media? How do people interconnect with the media in structuring their everyday lives? In “Media Technology: Critical Perspectives,” Joost van Loon illustrates how throughout the course of society, different forms of media have helped to shape our perceptions, expectations and interpretations of reality.

Drawing on the work of media scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams, the author provides a theoretical analysis of the complexity of media processes. He urges the reader to challenge mainstream assumptions of media merely as instruments of communication, and shows how the matter, form, use and purpose of media technologies can affect content.

The book uses practical examples from both old and new media to help readers think through complex issues about the place of media. This helps to create a more innovative toolkit for understanding what media actually are and the basis for trying to make sense of what media actually do. It uses case studies and examples from television, radio, print, computer games and domestic appliances.

“Media Technology” is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on media, social theory and critical theory-related courses.

Publisher McGraw-Hill, 2007
ISBN 0335214460, 9780335214464
Length 174 pages

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Harold A. Innis: Empire & Communications (1950/1986)

It’s been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis’s most important contributions to the debate about how media influence the development of consciousness and societies. In this seminal text, he traces humanity’s movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge.

Keywords and phrases
Babylonia, monopoly of knowledge, papyrus, Hittites, Egypt, Byzantine empire, Persian empire, Sumerian, oral tradition, Hyksos, Dionysus, Assyrian, Kassites, Orphism, monasticism, Roman law, Mitanni, Werner Jaeger, Aramaic, Athens

Edited by Dave Godfrey
Publisher Press Porcépic, 1986
ISBN 0888782446, 9780888782441
Length 184 pages

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Dan Laughey: Key Themes in Media Theory (2007)

Key Themes in Media Theory provides a thorough and critical introduction to the key theories of media studies. It is unique in bringing together different schools of media theory into a single, comprehensive text, examining in depth the ideas of key media theorists such as Lasswell, McLuhan, Hall, Williams, Barthes, Adorno, Baudrillard and Bourdieu.

Using up-to-date case studies the book embraces media in their everyday cultural forms – music, internet, film, television, radio, newspapers and magazines – to enable a clearer view of the ‘big picture’ of media theory.

In ten succinct chapters Dan Laughey discusses a broad range of themes, issues and perspectives that inform our contemporary understanding of media production and consumption. These include:

* Behaviourism and media effects
* Feminist media theory
* Postmodernity and information society
* Political economy
* Media consumerism

Publisher Open University Press, McGraw-Hill, 2007
ISBN 0335218148, 9780335218141
Length 248 pages

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Paul Heyer: Harold Innis (2003)

His name may not be as well known as that of his colleague and spiritual descendent, Marshall McLuhan, but Harold Innis’s (1894-1952) influence on contemporary critical media and communication studies has been no less profound. This concise look at Innis’s life and contributions to the communication field charts his beginnings in political economy to his later work in critical media studies and communications history, synthesizing his key publications and clearly showing their ongoing resonance for the field today. The book also includes an appendix by William J. Buxton on the “History of Communications” manuscript and one by J. David Black on the contributions of Mary Quayle Innis.

Keywords and phrases
Harold Innis, University of Toronto, monopoly of knowledge, Harold Adams Innis, fur trade, Marshall McLuhan, space-bias, Innis’s, Eric Havelock, History of Communications, Donald Grant Creighton, Canadian Pacific Railway, Alfred Kroeber, political economy, quipu, Thorstein Veblen, communication studies, Ronald Deibert, Peter Pond, David Crowley

Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2003
ISBN 0742524841, 9780742524842
Length 133 pages

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Agnes Ivacs and János Sugár (eds.): Buldózer: Médiaelméleti antológia (1997) [Hungarian]

220 pages anthology of contemporary media theory in Hungarian.
Published in October 97 by Media Research Foundation.
edited by: Agnes Ivacs and Janos Sugar
in cooperation with: Diana McCarty, Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz
biographical notes by: Diana McCarty
layout: Balazs Boethy using Heath Buntings graphic
ISSN: 1417-6033

Contents:
Introduction by Janos Sugar (English)
Preface by Geert Lovink (English)
I.
Gilles Delueze – Postscript on the Societies of Control
Thomas Pynchon – Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?
Tjebbe van Tijen – Ars Oblivivendi
Bruce Sterling- The Brief History of the Internet
II.
Richard Barbrook – Andy Cameron – Californian Ideology
Manuel De Landa – Markets and Antimarkets
closing debate of MetaForum 3
Felix Stalder – Financial Networks
Matthew Fuller- Spew- Excess and Moderation on the Networks
Critical Art Ensemble – Net Realities – Utopian Promises
Data Trash an interview with Arthur Kroker by Geert Lovink
Janos Sugar – Paradigm Shift Interruptus
III.
Pit Schultz – The Final Content
Geert Lovink – A Push Media Critique
Alexei Shulgin – Art, Power, and Communication
Calin Dan – Journey through a Data Room
David Garcia / Geert Lovink – ABC of Tactical Media
Miklos Peternak – In Medias Res – The Man without Interface
Lev Manovich – Digital Reality
Hans-Christian Dany – Schizos Still Wanna Have Fun
Michael Heim – Anxieties
IV.
Attila Kotanyi – Is There Any Media Criticism That Isn’t Suicidal?
Gabor Bora – AI Service
Alpar Losoncz – Digitalization of Borders
Erik Davis – Technoculture and the Religious Imagination
Peter Lamborn Wilson – Net-Religion – War in Heaven

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Arthur Kroker: Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan, Grant (1984)

Technology and the Canadian Mind explores the relationship between technology and culture in a comprehensive discourse on Canadian culture. McLuhan, Grant and Innis are viewed as key figures in understanding contemporary society from a uniquely Canadian point of view.

©1984, New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series
Montreal: New World Perspectives, ISBN 0-920393-00-4
Published simultaneously in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, ISBN 0-31278-832-0

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