R. L. Rutsky: High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (1999)

In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.

Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as “art, skill, or craft”), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a “high-tech style” and the most advanced technology is called “state of the art.” Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day — from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.

Progressing from the major art movements ofmodernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816633568, 9780816633562
196 pages

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Joseph Nechvatal: Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances. A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (1999)

This thesis researches into the ideals behind Virtual Reality technology (and its central property of total-immersion) by looking at VR through the prism of a philosophy of visual art. Its conclusive understanding is achieved through a broad formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness (indicative of an emerging immersive culture) by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy.

Keywords: architecture| Conceptual Art | consciousness | information-technology | myth | sex | space | virtual reality

Written in candidacy for a Ph.D. at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, U. K.

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Later published as a book (2009)

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Nadia Michoustina (ed.): Art, Technology and Modernity in Russia and Eastern Europe (2000)

Contents:
* Nadia Michoustina, Introduction
* Cynthia Simmons, Fly Me to the Moon: Modernism and the Soviet Space Program in Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra
* Julia Vaingurt, Base Superstructures and Technical Difficulties in Maiakovskii’s America
* Andrei Khrenov, Power and Technology as the Political-Aesthetic Project: Towards the Similarity of the Russian Avant-garde of the Twenties and Stalinist Cinema
* Kimberly Elman, Garden Cities and Company Towns: Tomas Baťa and the Formation of Zlin, Czechoslovakia

Selected Papers from the Conference held at Columbia University on March 31-April 1, 2000
The Harriman Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, November 2000
35 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR, updated on 2014-3-6)