Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin: Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)

Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning “remediation,” and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.

Publisher: MIT Press, 1999
ISBN: 0262024527, 9780262024525
295 pages

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Annet Dekker (ed.): Archive2020 – Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content (2010)

The term ’born digital’ is closely related, maybe even synonymous, with the term ‘natively digital’. This term is often used as reference to the object of study in the academic research of the Internet that gives focus to digital methods. In other words, research strategies that follow the specifics of the Internet as a medium. In this context the term refers to digital materials that are specific, and/or born into the Internet, like the link and the tag, and devices, like search engines, and opposed to those materials that have migrated to it, in other words, have been digitally reformatted.

“We have asked several stakeholders from different disciplines to write down their experiences, findings and solutions. These specialists from the area of born-digital preservation and archiving reflect on the current state of affairs in their specific field and identify the most pressing concerns. Established Internet artist Martine Neddam elaborates on the challenges an Internet artist faces over the years, from domain name registration expirations, to database back-ups, recent updates and much more. Researchers and artists Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk explain the benefits of using FLOSS and open standards for preserving born-digital material. Florian Cramer, lecturer at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, reflects on the PRINT/pixel international conference that was organized in May 2009, and discusses the issue of digital print material. Departing from the closure of two important advocates for media art preservation – the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute – Canadian researcher and writer Caitlin Jones focuses on the issue of responsibility for keeping our media art heritage alive. Gaby Wijers, head of Collection and Conservation at NIMk, Amsterdam and Gabriele Blome, art historian, University of Siegen, Germany, shed light on the first internationally shared online archive GAMA – the Gateway to European Media Art. Australian curator and researcher Lizzie Muller draws attention to the importance of capturing audience experiences when dealing with the preservation of born-digital cultural material. Jeroen van Mastrigt, lecturer at the Art, Media and Technology Faculty of the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU-KMT) in Hilversum, discusses archiving strategies in gaming.”

Compiled and edited by Annet Dekker
with chapters by Annet Dekker, Martine Neddam, Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk, Florian Cramer, Caitlin Jones, Gabriele Blome, Gaby Wijers, Lizzie Muller, Jeroen van Mastrigt, Maurits van der Graaf, Gerhard Nauta
Publisher Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam, 2010
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 NL License
ISBN 9789490108045
112 pages

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See also Speculative Scenarios, or What Will Happen to Digital Art in the (Near) Future?, 2013.

Oliver Grau (ed.): MediaArtHistories (2007)

“Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today’s media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.

Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp’s inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the ‘trained eye’ of art history.”

With texts by Rudolf Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Leonardo series
ISBN 0262072793, 9780262072793
475 pages

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