N. Katherine Hayles: Writing Machines (2002)

“Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.

Weaving together Kaye’s pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott’s groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips’s artist’s book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2002
Mediaworks Pamphlets
ISBN 0262582155, 9780262582155
144 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Roland Barthes: Image Music Text (1977)

“These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” and “The Death of the Author” are also included.”

Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath
Published by Fontana Press, London, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1977
ISBN 0006861350

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Victoria Vesna (ed.): Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (2007)

Discovering the role of data in creating a new way of experiencing—and making—art.

Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.

“Victoria Vesna’s edited anthology Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow provides a compelling collection of 16 essays that engage the shifting aesthetics of computational and interactive art forms. Database Aesthetics supplies the reader with an absorbing and diverse cross-section of stylistic, analytical and theoretical examinations of the meaning of the database to interactive (and, in some cases, traditional) media. Furthermore, it showcases several practical instances of artworks configured using databases and provides the reader with valuable insights from the artists into the design, implementation and execution of these projects. It offers a number of intellectually robust, rewarding and thought-provoking approaches for those already immersed in digital culture and its critical discourses. This book serves as a timely and valuable resource for both the classroom and beyond.” —Discourse

Contributors: Sharon Daniel, Steve Deitz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Legrady, Eduardo Kac, Norman Klein, John Klima, Lev Manovich, Robert F. Nideffer, Nancy Paterson, Christiane Paul, Marko Peljhan, Warren Sack, Bill Seaman, Grahame Weinbren.

Published by University Of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816641196, 9780816641192
336 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2011-8-6)