Craig J. Saper: Networked Art (2001)

“Outlines an exciting new approach to this confluence of art, media, and poetry.

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants.

In Saper’s analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures—etworks, publications, and collective works—give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.”

Key words and phrases: Fluxus, concrete poetry, mail art, mail artists, visual poetry, Dick Higgins, Big Dada, conceptual art, Ray Johnson, George Maciunas, sound poetry, Ken Friedman, Guy Bleus, Bauhaus, detournement, neoist, Max Bill, Augusto de Campos, George Brecht, Joseph Beuys

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0816637075, 9780816637072
198 pages

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The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China–for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society
By Zixue Tai
Edition: illustrated
Published by CRC Press, 2006
ISBN 0415976553, 9780415976558
365 pages
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Connected, or, What it means to live in the network society

In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays–on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us. One of our most exciting thinkers explores thelook and feel of our cultural moment.

Connected, or, What it means to live in the network society
By Steven Shaviro
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816643636, 9780816643639
289 pages

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Review (Kathleen Fitzpatrick), Review (Jarice Hanson), Review (Meredith Tromble)

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