Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth (eds.): Re:skin (2007)

In re: skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin—as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins—by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods—but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies.

The book’s agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of “body criticism”; a writer uses “faux science” to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another’s sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the “skin” of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re: skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.

Contributors:
Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alicia Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0262062607, 9780262062602
Length 356 pages

Keywords and phrases
avatar, Lynx, carapace, NFL Street, Issy, uterus, video games, Cleve, VRML, Melinda Rackham, Lara Croft, EverQuest, wetsuit, Posthuman, Shelley Jackson, interventional radiology, phenomenology, MMORPGs, sports games, Blast Theory

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Anna Bentkowksa-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner (eds.): Futures past: thirty years of arts computing (2007)

In decades past, artists envisioned a future populated by technological wonders such as hovercraft vehicles and voice-operated computers. Today we barely recognize these futuristic landscapes that bear only slight resemblance to an everyday reality. Futures Past considers digital media’s transformative impact on the art world from a perspective of thirty years’ worth of hindsight. Herein a distinguished group of contributors—from researchers and teachers to curators and artists—argue for a more profound understanding of digital culture in the twenty-first century.
This unprecedented volume examines the disparities between earlier visions of the future of digital art and its current state, including frank accounts of promising projects that failed to deliver and assessments of more humble projects that have not only survived, but flourished. Futures Past is a look back at the frenetic history of computerized art that points the way toward a promising future.

Published by Intellect Books, 2007
ISBN 1841501689, 9781841501680
128 pages

Key terms:
ARTstor, ontologies, Semantic Web, UCSD, iconography, art history, WordNet, digital art, Toyo Ito, Charles Rufus Morey, Princeton University, Kersale, synsets, University of Birmingham, Christian Art, Georg Nees, Medieval Art, software art, Jean Nouvel, intranet

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Digital Artists’ Handbook (2009)

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

Contents: Graphics; Working with sound; Working with others; Publishing your work; Working with digital video; Software art; Developing your own hardware.

Produced by folly and GOTO10
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License
228 pages

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