his reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life. The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation. - from Amazon.com
his reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life. The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation. - from Amazon.com
Lev Manovich is Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego who teaches new media art and theory and authored The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) and Tekstura (Chicago University Press, 1993). The Language of New Media has received over 40 reviews and been translated into Italian, Korean and Chinese; his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002–2003) and fellowships from CalArts, UC Santa Barbara and the Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin. Born in Moscow, he moved to New York in 1981, earned an M.A. (NYU, 1988) and a Ph.D. (University of Rochester, 1993); he has worked with computer media since 1984 and since 2006 directs the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. in Linz.
Panel with Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation), Alain Depocas (Daniel Langlois Foundation) and Woody Vasulka addressed preservation of media art performances, installations and digital works, focusing on digitization, emulation and documentation. They gave examples: Chadabe cited Luigi Nono and John Cage’s Bird Cage; Vasulka described scanning and OCR of about thirty thousand pages (Czech Republic contract ~$1,900, outputs RTF and TIF/PDF); Depocas summarized the Daniel Langlois documentation centre (open October 2000), its bilingual relational database, recent acquisitions and a Guggenheim partnership on the Variable Media questionnaire and emulation case studies.
A practicing artist outlines a career from poetry, script and print to multi-media and television, invoking Marshall McLuhan and citing equipment such as the Bolex reflex 16mm, Kodak Carousel, Sony porta-pack and Polaroid SX-70. They place USCO multi-media pieces Hubbub and We Are All One alongside work by Ken Dewey, Carolee Schneemann, Alan Kaprow and the Once Group as experiments in audience overload, multi-channel interaction and associative effects; they reference information theory and Norbert Wiener. They link the rise of an information industry—abilities to assemble, store, index, retrieve and program electromagnetically coded data—to artists working with information as programmable material using processing software and hardware.