Dear List,
Sarah Cook is at the AAH conference today, talking about "The
Impossibility of Digital Art History"
http://www.aah.org.uk/confs/2003aah/2003aah.html
I enjoyed Josephine Bosma's posting concerning the display of an
exhibition in Norway, and I thought this might be a good chance to
informally mention some recent 'books we have read' concerning histories
for new media.
It seems that when looking at digital media history, "when you're
holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail" (thanks to Jon Winet for
telling me this phrase). Hence, film theorists see narrative and
montage, technologists see the invention of computers, and cultural
theorists see disembodiment, speed and the military-industrial complex.
The dominant book discourse for new media has been cultural theory,
hence new books such as Lister et al, (2003) are nice and clear, but
tend to concentrate on popular culture, to the exclusion of art. The
New Media Reader from MIT (2003) is a hefty and useful tome, but again
does not discuss art to much extent, apart from in the useful
introduction by Lev Manovich. As one of the editors of the book has a
background in language theory, there are quite a lot of inclusions
concerning hypertext etc.
Charlie Gere's (convenor of the above conference) book (2002) is perhaps
the most wide-ranging of the recent books, and relates the history of
'digital culture' to technology, activism, and cultural theory (with an
endearing offshoot into British Punk). It is unusual in having a
substantial chapter devoted to art as digital culture. It's got a
succinct romp through the relevant bits of Structuralism,
Post-Structuralism etc, which is likely to be of great use to students.
This range includes some great pictures, and is a good antidote to the
dominantly US account of history in Packer and Jordon (2001).
The history of digital art he connects primarily to 'cybernetic' and
Conceptual influenced art (Fluxus et al), and he does not strongly
differentiate between net art and this history, which some net theorists
may argue with him about.
So, holding the hammer of the artist or the curator, what kind of other
histories might we write? (With a tip of the hat to Bookchin and
Artport who have made some interesting starts)
References:
Gere, Charlie (2002) Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books.
Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly
(Eds.) (2003) New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Randall Packer & Ken Jordan, (Eds.) (2001) Multimedia: from Wagner to
Virtual Reality. New York: Norton.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort (Eds.), (2003) The New Media
Reader. Cambridge USA: MIT.
|