Product Description

Digital technology has had a major impact on the production and experience of art during the past decade and a half. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography, and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installation, and virtual reality have emerged as recognized practices, collected by major museums, institutions, and private collectors the world over.

Christiane Paul surveys digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s up to the present day. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she discusses all the key artists and works. The book explores themes addressed by and raised by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks, and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright. 180 illustrations, 100 in color.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #363271 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Where many of her bigger-budgeted, theoretically enthralled predecessors have failed, Whitney Museum of Art curator Paul does an impressive job of compressing the activity of a huge field, in which there are no obvious heroes and no single aesthetic line, into a readable pocket-sized book. She is especially deft at laying the groundwork for such diverse practices as "telepresence" (beaming an artist's activities or daily life via telephone to other parts of the world), "browser art" (the creation of alternative browsers to navigate and present Web data) and "hacktevism"-political art, often aimed at corporations, that can include viruses and less pointedly destructive forms of maverick programming. With its beginnings in video and sound art, digital art grew exponentially in the '90s, and all the major players are here: from the Barcelona-based Web art team jodi (Joan Hemskeerk and Dirk Paesmans) to New York's Asymptote architectural team (founded by Hani Rashid); and from Robert Lazzarini's 3D anamorphic skulls to Eduardo Kac's weird experiments with animal genetics (he once bred a glow-in-the-dark rabbit). In fact, so much art is covered that Paul is often forced to contain her discussion of an artist's (or team's) entire body of work to a few sentences; the most information is found in the capacious captions accompanying the many illustrations. Flaws include a flat prose style and recourse to abstract postmodernisms to explain the meanings of some works, but in general Paul doesn't get lost in this language (endemic to digital culture), and so her parroting of these phrases doubles as a sort of reportage of a burgeoning new art culture, one that is independent of the gallery system and infused with the spirit of innovation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a lecturer in computer arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Customer Reviews

Digital Art
I purchased this book for an introductory digital art class and ended up not using it. The writting is not the best and I feel there wasn't enough visual information in this book. Some of the artists the author mentions are wonderful, but overall it was rather dissapointing.

one of the best new digital art guides ever.
you MUST have this book if you're interested in Digital Art. This is an indispensable guide for New Media creators. It covers Art projects that are less than two years old.

Consice overview of who is who
I used this book as a textbook in the classroom. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants a quick overview and to use this as a lanching point to understanding what new media is and exploring its rich and growing history. It's also very affordable.