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Redefining Digital Art: Disrupting Borders

Beryl Graham

in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse

This chapter examines the histories of digital art works and their place within physical spaces and the Internet to offer new perspectives on their meaning and identify the challenges they present ... More

This chapter examines the histories of digital art works and their place within physical spaces and the Internet to offer new perspectives on their meaning and identify the challenges they present for conventional practices of curatorship and documentation. It looks at the history and politics of art communities in networked and real-world locations to highlight collaborative art creation and creative content creation as well as education, accessibility, and usability. The chapter also explores current working categories for classifying digital art in physical installations and how these definitions influence the way art is shown in museums. It argues that digital art as a relatively new medium is disrupting “safe” categories and illustrates the negative implications of its particularly fluid characteristics for arts institutions. The chapter offers a new working definition of digital art to analyze the particular challenges involved in the collection, documentation, and conservation of new media art in institutions.Less

From Archaeology to Architecture: Building a Place for Noncommercial Culture Online

Gary O. Larson

in Social Media Archeology and Poetics

This chapter examines various approaches to ensuring a place for nonprofit culture online, drawing from the various noncommercial networking projects discussed elsewhere in the anthology, as well as ... More

This chapter examines various approaches to ensuring a place for nonprofit culture online, drawing from the various noncommercial networking projects discussed elsewhere in the anthology, as well as the 1990’s National Information Infrastructure policy debates in the U.S. and subsequent private-sector efforts. It discusses the key elements required for a broadly collaborative effort to (1) identify, cultivate, and promote the digital art resources that already exist; (2) develop new online projects; and (3) weave these resources together in a fashion that allows both online and offline arts activities to receive the serious attention to study they deserve. In addition to enhanced public sector leadership and expanded private sector support, the chapter calls for a more systematic application of curatorial expertise to the online sector, along with substantial grassroots participation in identifying the most reliable cultural resources that are too often lost in the vast expanses of the commercialized Internet today.Less

Visible Seams: The Media Art of Fatimah Tuggar

in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

This chapter covers black visuality with regards to technology studies, media theory, and contemporary digital art. Fatimah Tuggar's Fusion Cuisine revealed links among historical and present notions ... More

This chapter covers black visuality with regards to technology studies, media theory, and contemporary digital art. Fatimah Tuggar's Fusion Cuisine revealed links among historical and present notions of technological progress, racialized and gendered subjectivity, and globalization. Fusion Cuisine was her example of digital video and photomontage art that uses contemporary technology to comment upon the history of technological development. Her art was recognized for its playfulness and humor, crucial elements in both Robo Makes Dinner and The Lady and the Maid. Through the interactivity of Changing Space and Transient Transfer, Tuggar's work assumed decentered viewing positions and active audiences who do not necessarily share geographic, racial, gender, or temporal sameness. Her digital video pieces and photomontages generally touched the crisis of representing transnational subjectivities in an increasingly globalized and technologized world.Less

Code, Interpretation, Avant-Garde

Roberto Simanowski

in Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

This chapter assesses the problem of meaning in relation to aesthetic theories of presence and event. It supports narcissistic erotics of interpretation and considers ironic and multiple-perspective ... More

This chapter assesses the problem of meaning in relation to aesthetic theories of presence and event. It supports narcissistic erotics of interpretation and considers ironic and multiple-perspective readings as appropriate methods of criticism. It raises the question of the extent of familiarity critics need for coding; the effect of the specificities of the code on close readings produced from complementary humanities perspective; and the impact of understanding art based on the paradigm of programming on the experience of art. It also examines the issue of digital art and the avant-garde.Less

Digital Literature

Roberto Simanowski

in Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

This chapter provides a definition of digital literature and describes its characteristics. It evaluates the distinction between digital literature and digital art. It considers the role of the ... More

This chapter provides a definition of digital literature and describes its characteristics. It evaluates the distinction between digital literature and digital art. It considers the role of the author in text production by narrative machines and bacteria. It also raises the question of literature versus installation, stating that the phenomenon of digital aesthetics is full of borderline cases.Less

Aesthetics and New Media

Johanna Drucker

in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

This chapter suggests that discussion of new media should be considered in its relation to aesthetics. This would bring digital art into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a ... More

This chapter suggests that discussion of new media should be considered in its relation to aesthetics. This would bring digital art into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a contemporary landscape of imaginative and creative work and would put the fate of aesthetics in an era of new media under consideration. This chapter also criticizes the notion of the so-called hybrid aesthetics and generative aesthetics as problematic and proposes a speculative aesthetics that is grounded in the language of computational method.Less

Screen Cultures in the Asia-Pacific

Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams

in Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

In Chapter 4 we consider how mobile media require us to rethink the types of media and capital flows that take place in the Asia-Pacific region and what these movements say about cultural ... More

In Chapter 4 we consider how mobile media require us to rethink the types of media and capital flows that take place in the Asia-Pacific region and what these movements say about cultural geographies. As noted earlier, the rise of mobile media has become synonymous with screen culture in the region. Mobile media have also played a key role in amplifying, as well as disrupting, media capital flows. In this chapter we address the tensions between amateur and professional art in relation to media technologies and how they impact upon perceptions of the environment. We finish by reflecting upon the ubiquitous role of camera phones in these contemporary visualization cultures.Less

Slow FAST Forward: Enacting Digital Art and Civic Opportunities

Jennifer Parker

in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis

Globalization and the growth of digital technologies accelerate and expand the reach of artists’ work for public consumption beyond the traditional confines of art museums and galleries. This ... More

Globalization and the growth of digital technologies accelerate and expand the reach of artists’ work for public consumption beyond the traditional confines of art museums and galleries. This increasingly means the global public now has access to art that encourages viewer interactivity and participation in new and unprecedented ways. This chapter takes a moment to step back and remember arts research and community participation without the Internet and the World Wide Web. It puts into perspective how artists today have transitioned to digital life, thus diversifying the art world as digital art citizens participating in culture by sharing data and engaging the Internet as a means of publishing arts research directly to the public, for the public.Less

Online Activity and Offline Community: Cultural Institutions and New Media Art

Sarah Cook

in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse

This chapter examines digital art practices online, namely net.art, net-art, and art on the Internet. It provides definitions and examples, as well as established criteria, and considers the question ... More

This chapter examines digital art practices online, namely net.art, net-art, and art on the Internet. It provides definitions and examples, as well as established criteria, and considers the question of the necessity for collaborative art creation in an online environment. In particular, the chapter looks at cultural heritage institutions and new media art as well as the inherent multiplicity of agendas and structures prevalent on the Web, and also explores how the shifting politics and economics of the Internet affect the creative process of content creation online. Finally, it examines how artists use the Web as a way to engage with, and even sometimes create, offline communities as much as, if not more so, than online communities.Less

Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum: On Applied Media Theory

Marcel O’Gorman

in Necromedia

This chapter outlines the author’s concept of “applied media theory,” which is a method of humanities research rooted in the research/creation practices typical of professional artists. Applied media ... More

This chapter outlines the author’s concept of “applied media theory,” which is a method of humanities research rooted in the research/creation practices typical of professional artists. Applied media theory requires scholars to embrace the materiality and finitude of objects, transforming them into objects-to-think-with designed to shape contemporary technoculture.Less

Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices

John Cayley

in Reading Experimental Writing

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through ... More

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through 'grammaleptic' reading, which is explored in the chapter in relation to reading experimental digital language art. Analyzing contemporary works by Samantha Gorman, Danny Canizzaro, and Dave Jhave Johnston, the chapter yields and understanding of the importance of 'grammaleptic' reading to encountering such works, and to inhabiting a landscape of emerging digital language art.Less

The Generative Image

Thomas Nail

in Theory of the Image

simply valorize the digital or even the generative The generative arts have invented a new artistic pedesis and laid the ground for a new materialist aesthetics of the image. The chapter discusses ... More

simply valorize the digital or even the generative The generative arts have invented a new artistic pedesis and laid the ground for a new materialist aesthetics of the image. The chapter discusses the various forms that the generative arts have taken, including the ordered and disordered. In particular, disordered forms of contemporary images discussed here are the visual arts, literary, plastic, and sonic forms. The argument is not that the generative arts are the only or best forms of art. Their function has been to blaze a trail that shows us what all the arts have already been doing, to one degree or another. The challenge now is to unfold the consequences of this discovery in the arts, to draw our attention to what the contemporary image shows us about the image more generally and what it is capable of today.Less

The constructionist values of homo poieticus

Luciano Floridi

in The Ethics of Information

In this chapter, I argue that the infosphere is an increasingly poietically enabling environment, which both enhances and requires the development of an information ethics understood as a ... More

In this chapter, I argue that the infosphere is an increasingly poietically enabling environment, which both enhances and requires the development of an information ethics understood as a ‘constructionist ethics’ for morally responsible agents. Human agents, both as individuals and as multiagent systems belong to the class of responsible moral agents, so a constructionist ethics concerns them primarily and directly; not only them, however, because if there are any other kinds of responsible agents, the same constructionist ethics will concern them too. Only agents who are indifferent to the world—such as Aristotle’s unmoved mover or Spinoza’s natura naturans—are at most accountable, though not responsible, for what happens to it and hence fail to be addressed by a construction IE.Less

The Digital Image

Thomas Nail

in Theory of the Image

This chapter looks at the material and kinetic structure of the electromagnetic field itself and considers the way in which it has hybridized contemporary aesthetics.

Waste: The Trash Fiction of Alejandro Morales, Beatrice Pita, and Rosaura Sánchez

Marissa K. López

in Racial Immanence: Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the mass graves of unidentified immigrants discovered in South Texas in 2014. How, confronted with these decayed, dismembered border bodies, can literature and ... More

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the mass graves of unidentified immigrants discovered in South Texas in 2014. How, confronted with these decayed, dismembered border bodies, can literature and art move us beyond horror into a more just tomorrow? To answer, the author turns to two Chicanx science fiction novels: Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Pita and Sánchez’s Lunar Braceros (2009). Morales’s novel begins in colonial Mexico with a tale of La Mona, an unidentified plague similar to AIDS, and ends in a Los Angeles of the future, now known as LAMEX, beset by a similar disease curable only by the infusion of blood from “pure” Mexicans and threatened by waves of trash, which have taken on the characteristics of an animated organism, rolling in from the Pacific. Lunar Braceros, about nuclear waste workers of the future living on the moon, presents trash as a similarly transformative threat. Both novels offer conflicted visions of the human body as simultaneously of and apart from the land, a vulnerable but powerful catalyzing agent for change. The author frames this chapter with analyses of works in Mexican Canadian digital installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture series.Less