Vasulka Kitchen Cooking Reader (2020) [Czech]

28 October 2020, dusan

“This collection of texts is being published either relatively early, or perhaps a bit late: about one year after the colloquium Art Works from the Digital Era in Galleries and Museums. Since then, unexpected events have altered our course, reframing our thinking about the overlap between art, time, entropy, duration and disappearance, and perhaps adding a greater sense of urgency than it had one year ago.

The colloquium was organized to celebrate the the first anniversary of the opening of the Vašulka Kitchen Brno: Center for New Media. The organizers discussed topics with colleagues from the Brno House of Arts and the National Film Archive in Prague, hoping to promote thinking about the state and fate of art works of an “unstable“ nature, especially within the context of Czech collections, galleries, and museums. The objective was to establish contact, and to potentially cooperate with similar initiatives in Central Europe. During the two‑day meeting, the contributions mostly touched on the orientation of artistic and expert initiatives and institutions which were already focused on this issue, or were planning to turn their attention to it. In addition to contributions from Czechia, Vasulka Kitchen also welcomed contributors from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the United States, who shared their experiences of and opinions on the topic.

This publication is dedicated to the memory of Woody Bohuslav Vašulka.”

With English introduction and abstracts.

With contributions by Flóra Barkóczi, Dušan Barok, Martin Blažíček, Vannevar Bush, Lenka Dolanová, Kateřina Drajsajtlová, Jakub Frank, Joey Heinen, Jana Horáková, Erkki Huhtamo, Vít Janeček, Michal Klodner, Barbora Kundračíková, Štěpán Miklánek, Gustav Metzger, Anna Olszewska, Kryštof Pešek, Miklós Peternák, Pavel Sikora, Matěj Strnad, Barbora Šedivá, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Peter Weibel, Gaby Wijers, and Gene Youngblood.

Edited and with an Introduction by Miloš Vojtěchovský
Publisher Vašulka Kitchen Brno, Brno, October 2020
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9788090776333
253 pages

Review: Lukáš Pilka (Flash Art CZ/SK, 2021, CZ).

Book presentation (video, 13 min, Czech)
Colloquium
Publisher

PDF (77 MB, updated on 2020-11-28)
Wiki (added on 2023-6-7)

D. Fox Harrell: Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013)

13 May 2018, dusan

“An argument that great expressive power of computational media arises from the construction of phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.

In Phantasmal Media, D. Fox Harrell considers the expressive power of computational media. He argues, forcefully and persuasively, that the great expressive potential of computational media comes from the ability to construct and reveal phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination. These ubiquitous and often-unseen phantasms—cognitive phenomena that include sense of self, metaphors, social categories, narrative, and poetic thinking—influence almost all our everyday experiences. Harrell offers an approach for understanding and designing computational systems that have the power to evoke these phantasms, paying special attention to the exposure of oppressive phantasms and the creation of empowering ones. He argues for the importance of cultural content, diverse worldviews, and social values in computing. The expressive power of phantasms is not purely aesthetic, he contends; phantasmal media can express and construct the types of meaning central to the human condition.

Harrell discusses, among other topics, the phantasm as an orienting perspective for developers; expressive epistemologies, or data structures based on subjective human worldviews; morphic semiotics (building on the computer scientist Joseph Goguen’s theory of algebraic semiotics); cultural phantasms that influence consensus and reveal other perspectives; computing systems based on cultural models; interaction and expression; and the ways that real-world information is mapped onto, and instantiated by, computational data structures.

The concept of phantasmal media, Harrell argues, offers new possibilities for using the computer to understand and improve the human condition through the human capacity to imagine.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 9780262019330, 0262019337
xix+420 pages

Reviews: John Harwood (Artforum, 2014), Brian Reffin Smith (Leonardo, 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Media-N, 12(3): Uncovering News: Reporting and Forms of New Media Art (2017)

18 February 2018, dusan

“As the highly contested term “fake news” has become omnipresent in our media sphere and as the hacking of private networks for political gain have dominated the global news cycle, Media-N’s new issue is well positioned to uncover the complex relationship between media art and the multifarious forms of news reportage. We find in this wide-ranging journal issue, new media artists, writers, and theoreticians attempting to reveal, expose, and protest the production, rhetoric, and dissemination of news. Exploiting or subverting the existing network or creating alternative technologies, codes, or platforms, new media artists has probed the hegemonic grip of tradition forms of media production. Employing the raw material of journalism or intervening in the distribution and transmission of news information, artists have effectively critiqued or reimagined the unstable and fluid spaces of the contemporary news sphere. The nature of news information and its relationship to concepts of reality, truth, aesthetics, and the public and private are all at play in this issue.” (from Introduction)

With contributions by Erica Levin, Randall Packer, Kris Paulsen, Erin McElroy, Lisa Moren, Brandon Bauer, Rick Valentin, Francesca Franco, Yasuhito Abe, Vincent Cellucci, Jesse Allison, Derick Ostrenko, and Mina Cheon.

Guest editors: Abigail Susik and Grant Taylor
Publisher New Media Caucus, 2017
Open Access
ISSN 1942-017X

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