Context Providers , livre ebook

Intellect Books Ltd - Christiane Paul , Victoria Vesna , Margot Lovejoy

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226 pages

English

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A propos
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Extrait

Description

Margot Lovejoy is professor emerita of visual arts at SUNY Purchase and the author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.

Christiane Paul is adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art.

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and professor in the Department of Design and Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She is also director of the UCLA Art|Sci center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network.

Introduction

PART ONE

Defining Conditions For Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience – Margot Lovejoy

Missing In Action: Agency and Meaning In Interactive Art – Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken

Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art – Sharon Daniel

Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges – Mary Flanagan

PART TWO

Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production – Christiane Paul

Aesthetics of Information Visualization – Warren Sack

Identity Operated In New Mode: Context and Body/Space/Time – Marina Gržinić

Game Engines As Creative Frameworks – Robert F. Nideffer

Mapping the Collective – Sara Diamond

PART THREE

Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios – Victoria Vesna

Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm – Anna Munster

Working With Wetware – Ruth G. West

Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications – Ellen K. Levy

Art and Science Research: Active Contexts and Discourses – Jill Scott and Daniel Bisig

Sujets

Media Studies

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Película fotográfica

General officer

General

Film

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	27 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505398
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
Edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Lesley Williams Typesetting: John Teehan Index: Silvia Benvenuto
ISBN 978-1-84150-308-0
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Introduction
Part One:
Defining Conditions For Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience
Margot Lovejoy
Missing In Action: Agency and Meaning In Interactive Art
Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken
Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art
Sharon Daniel
Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges
Mary Flanagan
Part Two:
Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production
Christiane Paul
Aesthetics of Information Visualization
Warren Sack
Identity Operated In New Mode: Context and Body/Space/Time
Marina Gr ini
Game Engines As Creative Frameworks
Robert F. Nideffer
Mapping the Collective
Sara Diamond
Part Three:
Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios
Victoria Vesna
Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm
Anna Munster
Working With Wetware
Ruth G. West
Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications
Ellen K. Levy
Art and Science Research: Active Contexts and Discourses
Jill Scott and Daniel Bisig
Index
Biographies
INTRODUCTION
O ne of the main goals of this book is to provide context for an understanding of art that uses current technologies as a medium and to examine the multiple contexts that inform conditions of meaning in this medium. Using the term context providers as the title for a book, one cannot avoid invoking the term content provider and its connotations. Rather than setting up an opposition between context and content, this book aims to examine the relationship between the two, and the shifts in meaning that digital technologies may have brought about in understanding the interplay of content and context.
The term content provider had become a catchword in the times of the booming dot com industry, suggesting that the task of cultural producers in general and artists in particular would be to fill technologies with ideas, themes, and meaning. The terminology and concept seemed to suggest a return to a pre-McLuhanite age, ignoring all previous discussions about medium as message and the interconnectedness of form and content. One has to wonder if this seemingly deliberate neglect of previous critical discourse was brought about by the new technologies themselves, which, in their infancy, may have appeared as a mere commercial tool without inherent aesthetic qualities.
It was just a few decades ago that humanity saw the earth in context. Through development of technology, driven by the cold war, we landed on the moon and for the first time saw the planet we live on from a distance, in relation to the universe. This was a televised event, a live transmission that was watched by a record number of people globally. Those of us old enough to remember sat transfixed by the grainy black-and-white images and listened attentively to the broken voice signals. Buckminster Fuller referred to our planet as Spaceship Earth and Marshall McLuhan inspired many with the idea of the global village.
In 1957, roughly a decade before the moon landing and at the height of the cold war, the United States responded to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launch of Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DOD) in the United States to establish the lead in science and technology. In 1964, a proposal by the RAND Corporation, the foremost cold war think tank, conceptualized the Internet as a communication network without central authority that would be safe from a nuclear attack. By 1969, four nodes of supercomputers (at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Stanford Research Institute; and the University of Utah) formed an infant network, named ARPA Network (ARPANET) after its Pentagon sponsor. ARPANET was born in the same year Apollo landed on the moon. Telematic and computer culture emerged out of military interests and remain directly connected to it-more than any other art form to date.
Many artists immediately responded to the cultural climate of their time and early on experimented with video Porta-Packs, networks, and satellites. In 1977, Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp in New York and Sharon Grace and Carl Loeffler in San Francisco organized Send/Receive, which employed a communication technology satellite (CTS) and featured a fifteen-hour, two-way interactive transmission between the two cities. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Educational Television Center (Menlo Park, California) organized the world s first interactive composite image satellite dance performance between performers on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States. The performance included the first satellite feedback dance, a three-location, live-feed composite performance accompanied by flutist Paul Horn playing his time echo. These artists were very consciously striving to create context to expose others to the wonders of connectivity. Of course, this all had been anticipated by earlier generations of artists-the Dadaists, the Futurists, and even the Surrealists. Indeed, many performative and interactive contemporary works can be traced back to conceptualist work (as the authors in this book frequently point out).
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the context for artistic creation has again fundamentally changed. The 1990s were a crucial decade for the development of digital art and constituted a digital revolution, delivering an unprecedented amount of affordable computer power and software tools and making computers almost ubiquitous. The World Wide Web took the notion of connectivity to new levels. Media artists started moving into academia. There, many saw biotech and increasingly nanotech as the next space for exploration, and they used labs as an entirely new creative context.
Information usually is of little value if it cannot be contextualized and filtered, and digital technologies are the perfect tool for creating a referential framework that supports these tasks and processes. The way data and information are processed by means of these technologies-particularly within a communications network such as the Internet-again requires a renegotiation of polarities, such as text/context and content/context. As a multilayered informational system that is in constant flux and reorganization, the networked digital world seems to perfectly embody the notion of unstable contexts.
In the networked environment, links make it possible to connect texts and visuals to the contextual network they are embedded in, to visualize the network of references that would normally be separated by physical space. Digital culture is based on the absence of structures that are common in the offline world, which is saturated with hierarchies that do not make much sense online. Offline events, places, or objects situate themselves within a field of relations, most of which are kept out of sight, separated by space. The immediacy of transition that is made possible by hyperlinks erases the perception that we have moved between blocks of information that-in the offline world-would be pages and shelves, or even cities and countries apart. The order of the elements is no longer a reliable indicator of hierarchies. The spatial distance dividing the center from the margin or text from context is subordinated to the temporality of the link.
Context was traditionally understood as subordinate and supplemental. The hyperlinked structure of the Web undermines the distinction between a central text and its supplemental context: without any hierarchical structure, every context is yet another central text or vice versa. Digital media make relations and connections accessible and incorporate what we usually understand as context; they constitute a denatured context, enriching the context even as they contribute to making the very notion of context redundant.
Similar to the interconnectedness of form and content, medium, and message, the relationship between context and content can hardly be set up as a simple dichotomy. At least conceptually, content provides context for a related thematic area, and every context can become content, depending on the thematic lens under which it is examined.
Reading Context
At least since the 1960s, critical theory in the humanities has thoroughly analyzed the relationship between text and context. Deconstruction and poststructural theories, in particular, have profoundly influenced our understanding of the relationship between text and context. Postructuralism and Derridean deconstruction questioned notions of linear developments, hierarchies, and dichotomies (such as presence/absence), emphasizing the noncenter as a starting point for a playful exploration of meaning. Derridean deconstruction tries to dismantle the hierarchizing or totalizing effects of binary structures and to inverse binary opposition; it attempts to preclude the emergence of a synthesizing term tha