It’s that time of the year again when, after a lot of celebrations, comes the time for best wishes and a lot of new goals. So why not give 2019 a boost by reading interesting books about digital art and how it has changed the way we live today? We’ve put together a list of 14 books that will help you learn the basics of new media or learn more about the most recent books. Enjoy yourself!
With Digital Art, Christiane Paul, an Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, does a great job of putting it all into words. The author gives a short history of digital art, and he or she questions how digital media should be stored and kept. She gives descriptions of all new media that she categorizes as either object- or process-oriented. Then, she talks about the main themes in digital art. All have carefully chosen examples that show a wide range of artists and practices in the field.
With Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, Melissa Gronlund is able to show how media arts are connected to our digital society. In this book, you’ll learn about things like how the art world has changed because of the internet. You’ll also learn about things like pre-digital times, posthumanism, violence, and the internet. If you want to understand how art is made that has a direct connection to the spread and democratization of knowledge on a global scale, we recommend this book.
Jay David Bolter came up with the idea of digital plenitude, which he explained in many articles and lectures. Finally, he turned it into a book that will be released in April 2019. There is a big role that online platforms and digital communication play in a lot of different ways, from making and remixing to sharing and critiquing, so this is important. These new media, in Bolter’s view, change how we think about cultural artifacts, which means that cultural elitism is going down. How and why is art becoming more and more accessible to everyone? To us, art should be available to everyone and the digital world should be celebrated, so we can’t wait to start reading!
To understand why we look at the literature of our country’s best scholars, you should know that Danae HI is a French company. In the field of digital art, Edmond Couchot and Norbert Hillaire are the people to look at. The two wrote a paperback called L’art numérique: How technology came into the world of art in the 1960s. It gives clear and simple definitions of different digital media, names of important people, and an analysis of how much France is involved in this global art scene. First, pick this one if you’re from France.
For more than 30 years, Ars Electronica has brought together the most cutting-edge artists and researchers to think about how art, science, and technology all work together. It’s one of the few annual gatherings in digital art that you don’t want to miss. Luckily, there’s a publication that includes in-depth essays and beautiful art pieces to go along with the experience. Error, the Art of Imperfection, is a book that looks at society’s view of failure and perfection, which changes as technology gets better and better at what it does. This gives people both leverage and diminishment. Humans should think of their emotional intelligence as a strength so that they don’t feel like they’re competing with or competing against machines. A book is a good way to build your opinion and learn about this great event again.
In order to learn more about Net Art, you should look for Omar Kholeif. I Was Raised on the Internet was put on at the MCA Chicago last summer by a young curator who is very popular now. It shows how global online networks have been used as a way to make art since 1998. Release of a book with the same name quickly followed. It includes essays from some of the most important people in the field, like Jeremy Bailey, Zach Blas, James Bridle and Trevor Paglen. Images of the artworks and site-specific commissions are shown in the book. A reference that is up to date.
One of the biggest problems with new media art is that museums have to collect, curate, and keep track of works that aren’t real, were made with software, and have file formats that are out of date. Institutions need to use these new ways of making art to preserve this art and make it available to everyone. Oliver Grau is a great person to talk about what’s going on now and what’s coming up. In Museum and Archive on the Move, you can see for yourself what it looks like.
The “Documents of Contemporary Art” series at the Whitechapel Gallery is a critical source for understanding contemporary art practices because it gathers abstract texts from artists, sociologists, thinkers, and critics that are all related to a single topic. This series is called “Documents.” Many of them have to do with digital art, but we think Systems is the most important one to think about first. A new media expert, Edward A. Shanken, has put together a book that explains how cybernetics, generative, and social systems work. It includes texts from Norbert Wiener, N. Katherine Hayles, Nam June Paik, Roy Ascott, Jack Burnham, Iannis Xenakis, Manfred Mohr, Brian Eno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour. To get your brain ready for a little theory, this will get it going!
It’s likely that 2018 brought up a lot of questions about how artificial intelligence can be used in art. The first GAN artwork sold at auction and Mario Klingemann won the Lumen Prize were two examples of this. Something the MAXXI thought about when it put together its show Low Form, which features new media artists from around the world who think about the role of AI. There are also essays by Low Form’s curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and critics like Nora Khan, Eleonora Farhi, and Giulia Bini in the catalog to make it even more interesting. Most of the time, the book gives a history of virtual environments, and it says that Surrealism has had an effect on how people make simulations now.
The Geographical — Media Art
In Basel, there is a museum of electronic arts called HeK, and in Zürich, there is a museum called Migros Museums of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Digital Art (MuDA). Switzerland is making clear moves in the new media arts. When Dominik Landwehr started Media Arts in Switzerland, he wanted to show that there is a lot of good work and thought going on in Switzerland. Sound and video art, hacking, mashup and remix, do-it-yourself, robotics, and machine art are all covered in the book. It shows how these practices began in the mid-1990s and how they’ve evolved since then. A good thing to find right away.