The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations


Book Description

Based on the author's thesis (doctoral--Goldsmiths' College, 2017) under the title: The interface is obsolete.




The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations


Book Description

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.




Aesthetics, Gender, and Disability in Interactive Digital Art and Performance Art


Book Description

This book explores the tensions between aesthetics, gender, and disability in contemporary digital media installations and performance art. Notions of agency and subjectivity are connected to four contemporary political issues (artificial intelligence, migration and political violence, contemporary medical technologies and practices, and the Anthropocene) and analyzed against a Western legacy of utopian and dystopian ideas and desires that have shaped, and continue to shape, what it means to be human. The book’s main argument is that agency and subjectivity are not universal attributes; rather they are socio-material entanglements and contextually bound enactments that are strategically negotiated by the subject. Thus, they involve conflict, struggle, and other forms of resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, media and cultural studies, disability studies, and gender studies.




The Outsider, Art and Humour


Book Description

This cross-disciplinary book, situated on the periphery of culture, employs humour to better comprehend the arts, the outsider and exclusion, illuminating the ever-changing social landscape, the vagaries of taste and limits of political correctness. Each chapter deals with specific themes and approaches – from the construct of outsider and complexity of humour, to Outsider Art and spaces – using various theoretical and analytical methods. Paul Clements draws on humour, especially from visual arts and culture (and to a lesser extent literature, film, music and performance), as a tool of ridicule, amongst other discourses, employed by the powerful but also as a weapon to satirize them. These ambiguous representations vary depending on context, often assimilated then reinterpreted in a game of authenticity that is poignant in a world of facsimile and 'fake news'. The humour styles of a range of artists are highlighted to reveal the fluidity and diversity of meaning which challenges expectations and at its best offers resistance and, crucially, a voice for the marginal. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, fine art, humour studies and visual culture.




The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria


Book Description

This book focuses on the expanding contemporary art scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The decade was characterized by a high degree of experimentation as young artists began to work with artistic media that were new in Syria, such as video, installation and performance art. They were rethinking the role of artists in society and looking for ways to reach audiences in a more direct manner and address socio-cultural and socio-political issues. The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria will be of interest to scholars of global and Middle Eastern art studies, and also to scholars interested in the recent social and cultural history of Syria and the wider Middle East.




Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture


Book Description

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.




Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts


Book Description

This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to "all of us". One key figure these practices bring into play—the "everybody" (which stands for "all of us" and is sometimes a "new man" or a "new woman")—is discussed in an interdisciplinary way involving scholars from several European countries. A key aspect is how popularisation and communication practices—which can assume populist forms—operate in contemporary democracies and where their genealogies lie. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. on the ways in which visual creations can evoke desire as well as hatred.




The Iconology of Abstraction


Book Description

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings’ desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.




The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media


Book Description

The first systematic, comprehensive reference covering the ideas, genres, and concepts behind digital media. The study of what is collectively labeled “New Media”—the cultural and artistic practices made possible by digital technology—has become one of the most vibrant areas of scholarly activity and is rapidly turning into an established academic field, with many universities now offering it as a major. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media is the first comprehensive reference work to which teachers, students, and the curious can quickly turn for reliable information on the key terms and concepts of the field. The contributors present entries on nearly 150 ideas, genres, and theoretical concepts that have allowed digital media to produce some of the most innovative intellectual, artistic, and social practices of our time. The result is an easy-to-consult reference for digital media scholars or anyone wishing to become familiar with this fast-developing field.




Digital Interactive Installations


Book Description

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The arts have always been influenced by new evolving technologies. A certain aesthetic turning point was brought about by the silent ‘algorithmic revolution’ we have not hardly noticed, as the curators of the Centre of Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, propose with their current exhibition. At present, barely any part of social life is not influenced by these decision-making processes (algorithms) habitually executed by our computer devices. The radical changes this revolution causes for all of us are incalculable. However, we should not forget that algorithms, a well-defined set of technical instructions with a finite number of rules designed to solve a specific problem, have been incorporated as a creative instrument in the work of Albrecht D ̈urer and other artists since the late middle ages. The strict application of algorithms in art ultimately led to works explicitly integrating the recipient into the creative process, eventually culminating in the new media arts. Today’s art practices transform observers into users. Emerging with the changing paradigm is a new type of creator of cultural artefacts. This has been accompanied now for more than two decades by a fruitful collaborative atmosphere between the formerly strictly separated traditions of art and science. More often than not artists like such as the pioneers Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, and Jeffrey Shaw are at the same time scientific researchers found in institutional laboratories as heads of larger teams which include programmers, engineers and scientists of various different disciplines. They develop new hard- and software technologies themselves. All in all this development places not only an inestimable number of creative tools in the hands of the artist, but a highly dynamic and hybrid field that forms new areas like telepresence art, biocybernetic art, robotics, Net art, space art, experiments in nanotechnology, artificial or A-life art, creating virtual agents and avatars, datamining, mixed realities and database- supported art, which all explore the technologies of tomorrow. Not long ago, artists sought to explore software coding as the foundation of their expression and as a ‘material’ with specific properties. Like Max/MSP and others, new alternative programming environments based on a graphical interface concept facilitate bridging the gap between art and technology, and bring the artists back more control over the creative [...]