Lisa Nakamura: Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2007)

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet’s rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today’s online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase people’s racial, ethnic, and gender identity.

Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contrary—with examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca, and Minority Report; and online joke sites—that users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646139, 9780816646135
248 pages

Keywords and phrases
Asian American, visual culture, avatars, Internet, digital signatures, buddy icons, Minority Report, racial formation, African Americans, codetalkers, cyberpunk, Matrix trilogy, Details magazine, Jennifer Lopez, digital divide, posthuman, racial project, racism, However, Agent Smith

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Mel Alexenberg (ed.): Educating Artists for the Future. Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (2008)

In Educating Artists for the Future, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers in higher education in art and design offer fresh directions for educating artists for a rapidly evolving post-digital future. Their creative redefinition of art at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific enquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values offers groundbreaking guidelines for art education in an era of emerging new media. This is the first book concerned with educating artists for the post-digital age, propelling artists into unknown territory.

A culturally diverse range of art educators focus on teaching their students to create artworks that explore the complex balance between cultural pride and global awareness. They demonstrate how the dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for alternative pedagogical strategies that encourage student-centered, self-regulated, participatory, interactive, and immersive learning. Educating Artists for the Future charts the diaphanous boundaries between art, science, technology, and culture that are reshaping art education.

“Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the ‘media magic’ communicate content?”—Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Publisher Intellect Books, 2008
ISBN 1841501913, 9781841501918
344 pages

Keywords and phrases
Umbanda, transgenic, media art, prioric, Electronica, Roy Ascott, Eduardo Kac, aniconic, Nam June Paik, computer graphics, virtual reality, semiotic, locative media, Taoist, Bauhaus, Planetary Collegium, syncretic, education in Turkey, RISD, digital art

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Petra Kuppers: The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (2007)

“Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.

In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.

At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646538, 9780816646531
259 pages

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