Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History

2015-09-11

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Author: Joasia Krysa
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262029588
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 369

A critical mapping of the multiplicities of Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi—composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, inventor, collector, futurologist. Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid—a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, ”In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi's multiplicities. The contributors describe Kurenniemi's enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi's achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.

After Extinction

2018-03-20

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Author: Richard Grusin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452956324
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263

A multidisciplinary exploration of extinction and what comes next What comes after extinction? Including both prominent and unusual voices in current debates around the Anthropocene, this collection asks authors from diverse backgrounds to address this question. After Extinction looks at the future of humans and nonhumans, exploring how the scale of risk posed by extinction has changed in light of the accelerated networks of the twenty-first century. The collection considers extinction as a cultural, artistic, and media event as well as a biological one. The authors treat extinction in relation to a variety of topics, including disability, human exceptionalism, science-fiction understandings of time and posthistory, photography, the contemporary ecological crisis, the California Condor, systemic racism, Native American traditions, and capitalism. From discussions of the anticipated sixth extinction to the status of writing, theory, and philosophy after extinction, the contributions of this volume are insightful and innovative, timely and thought provoking. Contributors: Daryl Baldwin, Miami U; Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State U; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center; Joseph Masco, U of Chicago; Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York U; Margaret Noodin, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Bernard C. Perley, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Cary Wolfe, Rice U; Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, U of London.

Relive

2013-11-08

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Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262318334
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Leading historians of the media arts define a new materialist media art history, discussing temporality, geography, ephemerality, and the future. In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of “new media” and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the field, focusing on the materials of history—the materials through which the past is mediated. Drawing on the tools of media archaeology and the history and philosophy of media, they propose a new materialist media art history. The contributors consider the idea of history and the artwork's moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future—how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts. These essays, written from widely diverse critical perspectives, capture a dynamic field at a moment of productive ferment. Contributors Susan Ballard, Brogan Bunt, Andrés Burbano, Jon Cates, John Conomos, Martin Constable, Sean Cubitt, Francesca Franco, Darko Fritz, Zhang Ga, Monika Gorska-Olesinska, Ross Harley, Jens Hauser, Stephen Jones, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Caroline Seck Langill, Leon Marvell, Rudy Rucker, Edward A. Shanken, Stelarc, Adele Tan, Paul Thomas, Darren Tofts, Joanna Walewska

Curating Art

2021-12-30

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Author: Janet Marstine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317416651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 585

Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

Social Media Archeology and Poetics

2016-08-16

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Author: Judy Malloy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026233688X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 488

First person accounts by pioneers in the field, classic essays, and new scholarship document the collaborative and creative practices of early social media. Focusing on early social media in the arts and humanities and on the core role of creative computer scientists, artists, and scholars in shaping the pre-Web social media landscape, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents social media lineage, beginning in the 1970s with collaborative ARPANET research, Community Memory, PLATO, Minitel, and ARTEX and continuing into the 1980s and beyond with the Electronic Café, Art Com Electronic Network, Arts Wire, The THING, and many more. With first person accounts from pioneers in the field, as well as papers by artists, scholars, and curators, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents how these platforms were vital components of early social networking and important in the development of new media and electronic literature. It describes platforms that allowed artists and musicians to share and publish their work, community networking diversity, and the creation of footholds for the arts and humanities online. And it invites comparisons of social media in the past and present, asking: What can we learn from early social media that will inspire us to envision a greater cultural presence on contemporary social media? Contributors Madeline Gonzalez Allen, James Blustein, Hank Bull, Annick Bureaud, J. R. Carpenter, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Anna Couey, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Steve Dietz, Judith Donath, Steven Durland, Lee Felsenstein, Susanne Gerber, Ann-Barbara Graff, Dene Grigar, Stacy Horn, Antoinette LaFarge, Deena Larsen, Gary O. Larson, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Richard Lowenberg, Judy Malloy, Scott McPhee, Julianne Nyhan, Howard Rheingold, Randy Ross, Wolfgang Staehle, Fred Truck, Rob Wittig, David R. Woolley

Art in the Age of Machine Learning

2021-11-23

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Author: Sofian Audry
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367106
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 215

An examination of machine learning art and its practice in new media art and music. Over the past decade, an artistic movement has emerged that draws on machine learning as both inspiration and medium. In this book, transdisciplinary artist-researcher Sofian Audry examines artistic practices at the intersection of machine learning and new media art, providing conceptual tools and historical perspectives for new media artists, musicians, composers, writers, curators, and theorists. Audry looks at works from a broad range of practices, including new media installation, robotic art, visual art, electronic music and sound, and electronic literature, connecting machine learning art to such earlier artistic practices as cybernetics art, artificial life art, and evolutionary art. Machine learning underlies computational systems that are biologically inspired, statistically driven, agent-based networked entities that program themselves. Audry explains the fundamental design of machine learning algorithmic structures in terms accessible to the nonspecialist while framing these technologies within larger historical and conceptual spaces. Audry debunks myths about machine learning art, including the ideas that machine learning can create art without artists and that machine learning will soon bring about superhuman intelligence and creativity. Audry considers learning procedures, describing how artists hijack the training process by playing with evaluative functions; discusses trainable machines and models, explaining how different types of machine learning systems enable different kinds of artistic practices; and reviews the role of data in machine learning art, showing how artists use data as a raw material to steer learning systems and arguing that machine learning allows for novel forms of algorithmic remixes.

Machine Art in the Twentieth Century

2016-12-16

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Author: Andreas Broeckmann
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262336111
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 392

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods. “Machine art” is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works by avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s. An art historical perspective, he argues, might change our views of recent works that seem to be driven by new media technologies but that in fact continue a century-old artistic exploration. Broeckmann investigates critical aspects of machine aesthetics that characterized machine art until the 1960s and then turns to specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy, looking in particular at the work of the Canadian artist David Rokeby; vision and image, and the advent of technical imaging; and the human body, using the work of the Australian artist Stelarc as an entry point to art that couples the machine to the body, mechanically or cybernetically. Finally, Broeckmann argues that systems thinking and ecology have brought about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology, which has brought with it a rethinking of human subjectivity. He examines a range of artworks, including those by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami, whose work exemplifies the shift.

Fred Forest's Utopia

2017-09-08

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Author: Michael F. Leruth
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036495
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

“France's most famous unknown artist,” the innovative media provocateur Fred Forest, precursor of Eduardo Kac, Jodi, the Yes Men, RT Mark, and the Guerilla Girls. The innovative French media artist and prankster-provocateur Fred Forest first gained notoriety in 1972 when he inserted a small blank space in Le Monde, called it 150 cm2 of Newspaper (150 cm2 de papier journal), and invited readers to fill in the space with their own work and mail their efforts to him. In 1977, he satirized speculation in both the art and real estate markets by offering the first parcel of officially registered “artistic square meters” of undeveloped rural land for sale at an art auction. Although praised by leading media theorists—Vilém Flusser lauded Forest as “the artist who pokes holes in media”—Forest's work has been largely ignored by the canon-making authorities. Forest calls himself “France's most famous unknown artist.” In this book, Michael Leruth offers the first book-length consideration of this iconoclastic artist, examining Forest's work from the 1960s to the present. Leruth shows that Forest chooses alternative platforms (newspapers, mock commercial ventures, video-based interactive social interventions, media hacks and hybrids, and, more recently, the Internet) that are outside the exclusive precincts of the art world. A fierce critic of the French contemporary art establishment, Forest famously sued the Centre Pompidou in 1994 over its opaque acquisition practices. After making foundational contributions to Sociological Art in the 1970s and the Aesthetics of Communication in the 1980s, the pioneering Forest saw the Internet as another way for artists to bypass the art establishment in the 1990s. Arguing that there is a strong utopian quality in Forest's work, Leruth sees this utopianism not as naive or conventional but as a reverse utopianism: rather than envisioning an impossible ideal, Forest reenvisions and probes the quasi-utopia of our media-augented everyday reality. The interface is the symbolic threshold to be crossed with an open mind.

MATERIAL WITNESS

2020-02-25

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Author: Susan Schuppli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043572
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

Voicetracks

2017-05-19

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Author: Norie Neumark
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036134
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 231

The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts. Moved by the Aboriginal understandings of songlines or dreaming tracks, Norie Neumark's Voicetracks seeks to deepen an understanding of voice through listening to a variety of voicing/sound/voice projects from Australia, Europe and the United States. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories of sound, animal, and posthumanist studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with the assemblages of living creatures, things, places, and histories around us. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works she examines—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing human, animal, thing, and assemblages. She engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. She writes about remixes, the Barbie Liberation Organisation, and breath in Beijing, about cat videos, speaking fences in Australia, and an artist who reads (to) the birds. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.