Digital Aesthetic³ 2012 Conference and Exhibition – the third and final manifestation of the Digital Aesthetic series :: Conference: October 5-6, 2012 :: University of Central Lancashire, Preston :: Continue reading

xCoAx 2013: 1st International Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X :: June 27-28, 2013 :: University of Bergamo, Bergamo Città Alta, Italy :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: December 31, 2012. Continue reading

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship — A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian, Claire Bishop, Verso Books:

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.

Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Continue reading

Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, Hannah B Higgins (Editor), Douglas Kahn (Editor), University of California Press:

Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of “computer art.” Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging scholars from several disciplines, Mainframe Experimentalism demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social sites that has become commonplace today. Continue reading

Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, Florida Atlantic University:

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality, and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science, and somatic methodologies with classical Asian theories of body, mind, and action, these essays probe the nature of somatic existence and the role of body consciousness in knowledge, memory, and behavior. Continue reading

New Aesthetic New Anxieties is the result of a five day Book Sprint organized by Michelle Kasprzak and led by Adam Hyde at V2_ from June 17–21, 2012. Authors: David M. Berry, Michel van Dartel, Michael Dieter, Michelle Kasprzak, Nat Muller, Rachel O’Reilly, José Luis de Vicente.

You can download the e-book as an EPUB, MOBI, or PDF. Annotatable online version.

The New Aesthetic was a design concept and netculture phenomenon launched into the world by London designer James Bridle in 2011. It continues to attract the attention of media art, and throw up associations to a variety of situated practices, including speculative design, net criticism, hacking, free and open source software development, locative media, sustainable hardware and so on. Continue reading

Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling by Eduardo Navas, Springer:

Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling is an analysis of Remix in art, music, and new media. Navas argues that Remix, as a form of discourse, affects culture in ways that go beyond the basic recombination of material. His investigation locates the roots of Remix in early forms of mechanical reproduction, in seven stages, beginning in the nineteenth century with the development of the photo camera and the phonograph, leading to contemporary Remix culture. This book places particular emphasis on the rise of Remix in music during the 1970s and ’80s in relation to art and media at the beginning of the twenty-first Century. Navas argues that Remix is a type of binder, a cultural glue — a virus — that informs and supports contemporary culture. Continue reading

Artist Animal by Steve Baker, University of Minnesota Press:

Artist Animal examines the work of contemporary artists who directly confront questions of animal life, treating animals not aesthetically or symbolically but rather as beings who actively share the world with humanity. Featuring full-color examples of their art, it situates artists within the wider project of thinking beyond the human, asserting art’s power to open new ways of thinking about animals.

Animals have always been compelling subjects for artists, but the rise of animal advocacy and posthumanist thought has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between artist and animal. Continue reading

Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art by Carolyn Guertin:

In the first book to discuss the global politics of creativity and emergent models of authorship in a digital age, Guertin explores the creation of new media forms by artists who use technology to challenge established modes. Redefining authorship within remix culture, the book identifies the potentialities in the social nature of electronic works to foster new creative practices - from sampling to mashups to digital anthropophagy - on a global scale.

Carolyn Guertin holds a dual appointment in digital media — as Assistant Professor and Director of the eCreate Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington and as a member of the graduate faculty at Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany. Continue reading

DEAF2012 (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) :: Symposium: Vital Beauty - May 16-20, 2012 :: DeBalie, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The symposium focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century.

Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. Continue reading