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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Stuart Mealing (ed.): Computers and Art, 2nd ed (2002)

Computers & Art gathers together contributions from a broad, international spectrum of experts concerned with the computer as a tool for artists.

The approaches vary, with contributors looking at the historical, philosophical and practical implications of the use of computer technology in art practice. The variety of their approaches is matched by the diversity of backgrounds of the contributors who are artists, critics, educators, philosophers and researchers. Following the success of the first edition, this revised version includes three new chapters.

Publisher Intellect Books, 2002
ISBN 1841500623, 9781841500621
Pages 159

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Verena Andermatt Conley (ed.): Rethinking Technologies (1993)

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

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David D. Friedman: Future Imperfect. Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World (2008)

Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

• Comments on radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play • Covers many different technologies and the different futures they might bring • Focuses on what world could be like if various technological advances continue to develop and how we might adjust

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2008
ISBN 0521877326, 9780521877329
Length 351 pages

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Ken Hillis: Digital Sensations. Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (1999)

Considers the cultural and philosophical assumptions underlying virtual reality, and how the technology affects the real world.

Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology—or the idea—so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean—what does it do—to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at the ways representational forms generated by communication technologies—especially digital/optical virtual technologies—affect the “lived” world.

Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real; yet that process is “filtered” through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies, perception, and space held by the technology’s creators.

Through critical histories of the technology—of vision, light, space, and embodiment—Ken Hillis traces the various and often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address the often unintended and underconsidered consequences–such as alienating new forms of surveillance and commodification–flowing from their rapid dissemination. Current and proposed virtual technologies reflect a Western desire to escape the body, Hillis says.

Exploring topics from VR and other, earlier visual technologies, Hillis’s penetrating perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology.

Volume 1 of Electronic mediations
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816632510, 9780816632510
Length 271 pages

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David Bell: Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (2006)

This book surveys a ‘cluster’ of works that seek to explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society. It introduces key ideas, and includes detailed discussion of the work of two key thinkers in this area, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, as well as outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field. To do this, the book also explores selected ‘moments’ in this development, from the early 1990s, when cyberspace and cyberculture were only just beginning to come together as ideas, up to the present day, when the field of cyberculture studies has grown and bloomed, producing innovative theoretical and empirical work from a diversity of standpoints. Key topics include:
* Life on the screen
* Network society
* Space of flows
* Cyborg methods

Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-415-32431-1
Length 161 pages

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Peter Lunenfeld (ed.): The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)

The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages

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John Wood (ed.): The Virtual Embodied: Presence/Practice/Technology (1998)

The Virtual Embodied is intended to inform, provoke and delight. It explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge, space, virtue and virtuality to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence. It juxtaposes cutting-edge theories, polemics, and creative practices to uncover ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of why, how and in particular where, human actions, observations and insights take place.

In The Virtual Embodied, many of the authors, artists, performers and designers apply their interdisciplinary passions to questions of embodied knowledge and virtual space. In doing so it chooses to acknowledge the limitations of the conventional linear book and uses them creatively to challenge existing genres of multi-media and networked consumerism.

Publisher Routledge, 1998
ISBN 041516026X, 9780415160261
Length 226 pages

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Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.): The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (2002)

This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of The Visual Culture Reader brings together key writings as well as specially commissioned articles covering a wealth of visual forms including photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, advertising, television, cinema and digital culture. The Reader features an introductory section tracing the development of visual culture studies in response to globalization and digital culture, and articles grouped into thematic sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editor and conclude with suggestions for further reading.

Edition 2
Publisher Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415252229, 9780415252225
Length 737 pages

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Ron Burnett: How Images Think (2005)

Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are “thinking”; ascribing thought to machines redefines our relationship with them and enlarges our ideas about body and mind. Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines.

After presenting an overview of visual perception, Burnett examines the interactive modes of new technologies—including computer games, virtual reality, digital photography, and film— and locates digital images in a historical context. He argues that virtual images occupy a “middle space,” combining the virtual and the real into an environment of visualization that blurs the distinctions between subject and object—part of a continuum of experiences generated by creative choices by viewers, the results of which cannot be attributed either to images or to participants.

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262524414, 9780262524414
Length 253 pages

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Peter Lunenfeld: The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)

The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages

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Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
Length 399 pages

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Roy Ascott (ed.): Reframing Consciousness (1999)

We are in the middle of a process of complex cultural transformation, but to what extent is this matched by the transformation in the way we see ourselves? This book covers a wide-ranging discussion on the interaction between Art, Science and Technology, and goes on to challenge assumptions about ‘reality’.

Loosely themed around four key elements of Mind, Body, Art and Values, the editor leads the investigation through the familiar territories of interactive media and artificial life, combining them with new and ancient ideas about creativity and personal identity.The contributing authors number over sixty highly respected practitioners and theorists in art and science, bringing to the subject a stimulating diversity of approach and a rich background of knowledge.

Art has long been preoccupied with questions involving the mind and consciousness. But it is fast finding that new technology, creatively applied, brings new possibilities to bear. This volume provides a strong foundation for the debates that are sure to follow in this field.

Publisher Intellect Books, 1999
ISBN 1841500135, 9781841500133
Length 314 pages

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Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
Length 236 pages

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Derrick De Kerckhove: The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality (1995/1997)

This is a bold vision of the electronic media and the nature of reality in a world increasingly wired to technology. It proposes and explores concepts such as: whether democracy is outmoded and must be redesigned to reflect how technology affects power structures; whether the electronic media have extended our psychology as well as our nervous systems and our bodies; whether art must redress the balance with science and reclaim technology; and whether electronic media are reversing the effects of language, literacy and the alphabet, and whether this is a good thing.

Editor Christopher Dewdney
Publisher Kogan Page Publishers, 1997
ISBN 074942480X, 9780749424800
Length 226 pages

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