Paul Shepheard: Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture (2003)

“According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are. In his writings, Shepheard examines old assumptions about architecture and replaces the critical theory of the academic with the active theory of the architect-citizen enamored of the world around him.

Artificial Love weaves together three stories about architecture into one. The first, about machines as architecture, leads to speculations about technology and the human condition and to the assertion that machines are the sculptures of today. The second story is about the ways that architecture reflects the tribal and personal desires of those who make it. In the West, ideas of community, multiculturalism, and globalization compete furiously, leaving architecture to exist as it always has, as the past in the present. The third story features individual people experiencing their lives in the context of architecture. Here, Shepheard borrows the rhetorical device of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man to propose that each person’s life imitates the accumulating history of the human species. Shepheard’s version of the history of humans is a technological one, in which machines become sculpture and sculpture becomes architecture. For Shepheard, our machines do not separate us from nature. Rather, our technology is our nature, and we cannot but be in harmony with nature. The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a wonderful and powerful thing.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262692856, 9780262692854
296 pages

Keywords and phrases
Enchanted Rocks, Hi-Tek, songlines, quadriga, Michel Serres, Enewetak, geoid, dubbya, Ridge Racer, Bothy Band, Elgin marbles, Uluru, Cedric Price, Big Bang, tesseract, Alcock and Brown, Houston, Persian carpets, hegemony, chronotonic

publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-7-29)

Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, Eric Ketelaar (eds.): Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (2006)

“Sign Here! features a number of articles from different fields, reaching from cultural and media studies to reaching from cultural and media studies to literature, film and art, and from philosophy and information studies to law and archival studies. Questions addressed in this book are: Will handwriting disappear in the age of new (digital) media? What happens to important cultural and legal concepts, such as original, copy, authenticity, reproducibility, uniqueness, and iterability? Where is the writing hand to be located if handwriting is performed not immediately ‘by hand’ but when it is (re)mediated by electronic or artistic media?”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Transformations in Art and Culture series
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9053568166, 9789053568163
247 pages

Keywords and phrases
weblogs, digital signature, Saul Bass, electronic signature, Martin Scorsese, Hurufi, Hitler diaries, Anne Frank House, tattoo, Arnold Dreyblatt, calligraphic, identity theft, Shirin Neshat, Eecke, handwriting, blogging, Jacques Derrida, Adolf Hitler, mise en abyme, digital media

Publisher
OAPEN

PDF (updated on 2013-3-5)

Margot Lovejoy: Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (2004)

Digital Currents explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator. Just as the rise of photographic techniques in the mid 1800s shattered traditional views about representation, so too have contemporary electronic tools catalyzed new perspectives on art, affecting the way artists see, think, and work, and the ways in which their productions are distributed and communicated.

Margot Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making – video, computer, the internet – in the new edition of this richly illustrated book. She provides a context for the works of major artists in each media, describes their projects, and discusses the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field.

Digital Currents fills a major gap in our understanding of the relationship between art and technology, and the exciting new cultural conditions we are experiencing.

Publisher Routledge, 2004
ISBN 0415307805, 9780415307802
342 pages

Keywords and phrases
Bill Viola, Walter Benjamin, Nam June Paik, postmodern, Laurie Anderson, Christa Sommerer, Jenny Holzer, Miroslaw Rogala, virtual reality, Roy Ascott, Joan Jonas, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Eduardo Kac, Chris Burden, Electronic Arts, John Cage, Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Kit Galloway

author
publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-14)