Digital Art
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Paul does an impressive job of compressing the activity of a huge field, in which there are no obvious heroes and no single aesthetic line.” —Publishers Weekly
Digital technology has revolutionized the way we produce and experience art today. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography, and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but the emergence of entirely new forms such as internet and software art, digital installation, and virtual reality has forever changed the way we define art.
Christiane Paul surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the 1980s to the present day and looks ahead to what the future may hold. She discusses the key artists and works in the genre, drawing a distinction between work that uses digital practices as tools to produce traditional forms and work that uses them to create new kinds of art. She explores the broader themes and questions raised by these artworks such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks and telepresence, and issues surrounding the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art.
This third, expanded edition of the popular resource investigates key areas of digital art practice that have gained prominence in recent years, including interactive public installation, augmented and mixed reality, social networking, and file-sharing technologies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Where many of her bigger-budgeted, theoretically enthralled predecessors have failed, Whitney Museum of Art curator Paul does an impressive job of compressing the activity of a huge field, in which there are no obvious heroes and no single aesthetic line, into a readable pocket-sized book. She is especially deft at laying the groundwork for such diverse practices as "telepresence" (beaming an artist's activities or daily life via telephone to other parts of the world), "browser art" (the creation of alternative browsers to navigate and present Web data) and "hacktevism" political art, often aimed at corporations, that can include viruses and less pointedly destructive forms of maverick programming. With its beginnings in video and sound art, digital art grew exponentially in the '90s, and all the major players are here: from the Barcelona-based Web art team jodi (Joan Hemskeerk and Dirk Paesmans) to New York's Asymptote architectural team (founded by Hani Rashid); and from Robert Lazzarini's 3D anamorphic skulls to Eduardo Kac's weird experiments with animal genetics (he once bred a glow-in-the-dark rabbit). In fact, so much art is covered that Paul is often forced to contain her discussion of an artist's (or team's) entire body of work to a few sentences; the most information is found in the capacious captions accompanying the many illustrations. Flaws include a flat prose style and recourse to abstract postmodernisms to explain the meanings of some works, but in general Paul doesn't get lost in this language (endemic to digital culture), and so her parroting of these phrases doubles as a sort of reportage of a burgeoning new art culture, one that is independent of the gallery system and infused with the spirit of innovation.
