Oliver Grau (ed.): MediaArtHistories (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, digital art, early media art, kinetic art, media art, media theory, technology, virtual reality
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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Comment (0)Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, internet, labor, market economy, media art, media culture, media theory, net art, net culture, network culture, software, sound, technology
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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Comment (0)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
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
David Holmes (ed.): Virtual Globalization: Virtual Spaces/Tourist Spaces (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, globalisation, information technology, internet, technology, telematics, tourism, virtual communities
This book examines the interrelationship between the telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental inthe production of homogenous world-spaces, and how these in turn presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity. This work will be of essential interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, geography, cultural studies and media studies.
Publisher Routledge, 2001
Volume 1 of Routledge advances in sociology
ISBN 0415236738, 9780415236737
Length 269 pages
A Framework for Web Science (2006)
Filed under paper | Tags: · internet, p2p, semantic web, technology, web, web science
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.
Authors: Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner
Publisher Now Publishers Inc, 2006
Foundations and Trends in Web Science. Vol. 1, No 1 (2006) pp. 1–130
ISBN 1933019336, 9781933019338
Length 134 pages
David Holmes: Communication Theory. Media, Technology and Society (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication, community, cyberspace, internet, mass media, technology, theory of communication, virtual communities
This book offers an introduction to communication theory that is appropriate to our post-broadcast, interactive media environment. The author contrasts the ‘first media age’ of broadcast with the ’second media age’ of interactivity.
Communication Theory argues that the different kinds of communication dynamics found in cyberspace demand a reassessment of the methodologies used to explore media, as well as new understandings of the concepts of interaction and community (virtual communities and broadcast communities).
The media are examined not simply in terms of content, but also in terms of medium and network forms. Holmes also explores the differences between analogue and digital cultures, and between cyberspace and virtual reality.
The book serves both as an upper level textbook for New Media courses and a good general guide to understanding the sociological complexities of the modern communications environment.
Publisher SAGE, 2005
ISBN 0761970703, 9780761970705
Length 255 pages
Joseph Weizenbaum: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, computation, critique, ethics, technology
Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential book displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.
Publisher W. H. Freeman, 1976
ISBN 0716704633, 9780716704638
Length 300 pages
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Comment (1)Manuel Castells: The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (2000/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, economy, internet, network society, society, technology
This first book in Castells’ groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale.
* Groundbreaking volume on the impact of the age of information on all aspects of society
* Includes coverage of the influence of the internet and the net-economy
* Describes the accelerating pace of innovation and social transformation
* Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe
2nd Edition with a New Preface
Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2009
Volume 1 of Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture
ISBN 1405196866, 9781405196864
Length 656 pages
John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, design, graphic design, technology
Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We’re rebelling against technology that’s too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte “read me” manuals. The iPod’s clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that’s simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.
Maeda—a professor in MIT’s Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of “improved” so that it doesn’t always mean something more, something added on.
Maeda’s first law of simplicity is “Reduce.” It’s not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren’t distracted by features and functions they don’t need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: “Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple.” Maeda’s concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls “The One,” tells us: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2006
Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
ISBN 0262134721, 9780262134729
Length 100 pages
Régis Debray: Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · marxism, media, media studies, mediasphere, mediation, mediology, semiology, technology, theory
Media Manifestos sums up over a decade of Régis Debray’s research and writing on the evolution of systems of communication. Debray announces the battle-readiness of a new sub-discipline of the sciences humaines: “mediology.” Scion of that semiology of the sixties linked with the names of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco — and trans-Atlantically affiliated to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan (“medium is message”) — “mediology” is yet in (dialectical) revolt against its parent thought-system. Determined not to lapse back into the empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke, mediology is just as resolved to dispel the illusion of the signifier, slough off the scolasticism of the code, and recover the world — in all its mediatized materiality.
Written with Debray’s customary brio, Media Manifestos is no mere contribution to “media studies.” Steeped in the intellectual ethos of Althusser and Foucault, informed by the historical work of the Annales school, and yet plugged in to today’s audiovisual culture, Debray’s book turns a neologism (“mediology”) into a tool-kit with which to rethink the whole business of mediation.
Translated by Eric Rauth
Publisher Verso, 1996
ISBN 1859840876, 9781859840870
179 pages
Verena Andermatt Conley (ed.): Rethinking Technologies (1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, autopoiesis, cyberspace, cyborgs, philosophy, philosophy of technology, postmodern, science, technology, virtual reality
Grounded on the assumption that the relationship between the arts and the sciences is dictated by technology, the essays in Rethinking Technologies explore trends in contemporary thought that have been changing our awareness of science, technology, and the arts.
Contributors: Teresa Brennan, Patrick Clancy, Verena Andermatt Conley, Scott Durham, Thierry de Duve, Françoise Gaillard, Félix Guattari, N. Katherine Hayles, Alberto Moreiras, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell, Ingrid Scheibler, Paul Virilio.
Edited by Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective (Oxford, Ohio)
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1993
ISBN 0816622159, 9780816622153
248 pages
Rosalind H. Williams: Notes on the Underground. An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, new ed. (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, history, technology, underground
The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.
Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”
New Edition
With a new afterword by the author
Publisher The MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262731908, 9780262731904
Length 283 pages
Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, communication, global warming, internet, mass media, network society, neuroscience, politics, technology, youtube
We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.
Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment. His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging–”mass self-communication”–politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0199567042, 9780199567041
Length 571 pages
N. Katherine Hayles: My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · cellular automata, code, intermediation, language, posthuman, simulation, speech, technology, writing
We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.
My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.
We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2005
ISBN 0226321479, 9780226321479
Length 290 pages
