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)

Fred Turner: Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production (2009)

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information technologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, technology and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation, and interviews, this paper explores the ways that Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world – including the building of a socio-technical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion of social and professional interaction – help shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The paper thus develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay area’s new media industries. (Abstract)

Key Words: peer production, counterculture, cultural economy, art and technology, cultural infrastructure, free labor.

Published in New Media & Society 11, 2009

PDF

The Myth of the Machine, 2 Vols: Technics and Human Development & The Pentagon of Power (1967/1970–) [DE, YU, RU, ES]

Mumford explains the forces that have shaped technology since prehistoric times and shaped the modern world. He shows how tools developed because of significant parallel inventions in ritual, language, and social organization.

Publisher Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1967 and 1970
342 and 496 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

Mythos der Maschine. Kultur, Technik und Macht (German, trans. Liesl Nürenberger and Arpad Hälbig, both volumes, 1977, updated on 2014-3-19)
Pentagon moći: Mit o mašini 2 (Serbo-Croatian, trans. Nikica Petrak, 1986/2009, added on 2014-3-19)
Mif mashiny: tekhnika i razvitie chelovechestva (Russian, trans. T. Azarkovich and B. Skuratov, 2001, DJVU, added on 2014-3-19)
El mito de la máquina. Técnica y evolucion humana (Spanish, trans. Arcadio Rigodón, 2010, added on 2014-3-19)
El mito de la máquina. El pentágono del poder (Spanish, trans. Javier Rodríguez Hidalgo, 2011, added on 2014-3-19)