Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (2002)

“According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities, user groups, social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), artists, and cultural critics into the core of Internet development.

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers’ groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control.

The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for all, the rise and fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable social networks, the fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies of Internet activists, mailing list culture, and collaborative text filtering. Stressing the importance of intercultural collaboration, Lovink includes reports from Albania, where NGOs and artists use new media to combat the country’s poverty and isolation; from Taiwan, where the September 1999 earthquake highlighted the cultural politics of the Internet; and from Delhi, where a new media center explores free software, public access, and Hindi interfaces.”

Publisher    MIT Press, 2002
ISBN    0262621800, 9780262621809
382 pages

Reviews: McKenzie Wark (Rhizome, 2002), Lisa Nakamura (Mute, 2002), Franco Berardi Bifo (Generation Online, n.d.), Catriona Mills (M/C Reviews), Christina Van Houten (Rhizomes, 2009), Kirk McElhearn (Technology & Society, n.d.), Evangelos Milios (Social Science Computer Review, 2003), Arnold Peskin (Journal of Urban Technology, 2003).

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Alessandro Ludovico (ed.): Ubermorgen.com. Media Hacking vs. Conceptual Art (2009)

“This is the first time for the complete works of the artist-duo UBERMORGEN.COM – lizvlx and Hans Bernhard – to be presented in printed form and subjected to critical scrutiny.

To mark the tenth anniversary of UBERMORGEN.COM, a number of internationally respected critics, curators and artists focus on these border-liners in the global mass media and their radical actions on the precipice of the international art world. The interplay of concept art, software art, fine art, media hacking, net art and media activism makes UBERMORGEN-COM a hybrid gesamtkunstwerk within the contemporary European media-art avant-garde.

With texts and interviews by and with Inke Arns, Florian Cramer, Raffael Dörig, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Weibel and others.”

Publisher Merian, Basel, March 2009
ISBN 9783856164607
208 pages

Review: Rob Myers (Furtherfield, 2009).

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Laura U. Marks: Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002)

“In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years-sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.

From this emerges a materialist theory-an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks’s approach leads to an appreciation of the works’ mortal bodies: film’s volatile emulsion, video’s fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as “virtual” and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Oct 2002
ISBN 0816638896, 9780816638895
288 pages

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