Olga Goriunova: Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2011)

“In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of power.

Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.”

Publisher Routledge, 2011
Volume 35 of Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
ISBN 0415893100, 9780415893107
228 pages

Reviews: Annet Dekker (OPEN, 2012), Tony Sampson (Mute, 2012), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2012), Hanna Kuusela (Media, Culture & Society, 2013).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2018-10-23)

Wolfgang Sützl, Geoff Cox (eds.): Creating Insecurity: Art and Culture in the Age of Security (2009)

“Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terrorist.

Following the words of Giorgio Agamben (from his 2001 article “On Security and Terror”), security has become the basic principle of international politics after 9/11, and the “sole criterion of political legitimation.” But security — reducing plural, spontaneous and surprising phenomena to a level of calculability — also seems to operate against a political legitimacy based on possibilities of dissent, and stands in clear opposition to artistic creativity. Being uncalculable by nature, art is often incompatible with the demands of security and consequently viewed as a “risk,” leading to the arrest of artists, and a neutralization of innovative environments for the sake of security.

Yet precisely the position of art outside the calculable seems to bring about a new politicization of art, and some speak of art as “politics by other means.” Has art become the last remaining enclave of a critique of violence? Yet how “risky” can art be?”

Contributions from Giorgio Agamben, Konrad Becker, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, glorious ninth, Brian Holmes, carlos katastrofsky, Martin Knahl, Norbert Koppensteiner, Daniela Ingruber, The Institute for Applied Autonomy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mukul Patel, Luis Silva, Wolfgang Sützl, Tiziana Terranova, and McKenzie Wark.

Publisher Autonomedia/I-DAT, 2009
Creative Commons license
DATA browser series, 4
ISBN 9781570272059
208 pages

Authors, (2)
Publisher

PDFs (updated on 2016-12-12)

Ira Greenberg: Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (2007)

“This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary. The book then goes through using Processing to code lines, curves, shapes, and motion, continuing to the point where you’ll have mastered Processing and can really start to unleash your creativity with realistic physics, interactivity, and 3D! In the final chapter, you’ll even learn how to extend your Processing skills by working directly with the powerful Java programming language, the language Processing itself is built with.”

Foreword by Keith Peters
Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 159059617X, 9781590596173
810 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-1-20)