Reading the Gallery, Virtually
To work in the world of art is to embrace few strict rules, even in a forest of ideologies. One of the apparent constants, however, could be articulated by an equation, or more accurately, an...
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From Object to Statement
To the European sentiment, indistinguishably woven with history as with every progressive notion of culture emerging from it, the directness that spirits the American sense of art has often seemed, in...
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Space and Structure in Post-Architecture
Disciplines thrive on dualities, and the architectural order resonates to one ethic, a sort of moral philosophy of the profession, more than any other, namely the endlessly quoted mantra that form...
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Participation, Mediated and Recursive
When we speak of aesthetic participation, the most immediately suggestive image is of an experience resembling theater, where works hanging on a wall perform in manifold ways to silent audiences whose...
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From Objecthood to Processhood
At the conclusion of a recent meeting of a digital media theory course at RISD, one of my students pointed to a paper sign tacked on the wall. The sheet’s handwriting expressed the single question,...
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Transversing Shamanism, Turing, and ELIZA
Every so often, scholarship returns to the intractably alluring problem of human dialogic interaction with systems designed with capabilities for patterned response. Several ontic questions persist —...
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Formalisms of Digital Text
The practice of writing, always in flux, has over the last two decades been especially influenced by the emergence of digital innovations in new text genres – email messages, newsgroup postings, and...
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Optimizing Metaprogramming
At a discussion of free software’s future at the recent libreplanet 2010 conference, Nick Montfort shares an important observation about the need to address the oligopoly of the advanced programmer,...
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Spatial Engagement’s Chronotope in Electronic Art and the Public Sphere
The received notion of the public sphere in fact melds an array of narrative and structural elements into a domain of expressive possibility whose center of attention serves both aesthetic and...
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Cyberculture’s Perpetual “Until Something Else”
‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction Francisco J. Ricardo If nothing fully encompasses what we might mean by the use of the term “cyberculture”, then it is not because the term is...
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The Aura of the Distributed Moment
Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations....
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Emergent Form in the Post-Literary Mechanism, an Historical Argument
We know from aesthetic history, that of literature, architecture, and the visual arts, that important chapters — and debates — in each lineage have circled around normative concerns relating to a...
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Emergent Form in the Post-Literary Mechanism, From Exposition to Reflexivity
The schematization you see here is a speculation on the move from mechanism to reception that some electronic works have been fostering. For some time now, I’ve been looking at the problem of what...
View ArticleThe Engagement Aesthetic – An Introduction
If we read between the lines of all that has been written about digital art — however loosely one might define this enterprise — we might locate a ubiquitous characteristic present to all definitions,...
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Engagement II – Marclay’s Media Metonymy
It is indeed rare for three major venues of art in one city to exhibit the work of a single artist simultaneously. Even in New York City, that metropolis whose many art spaces might accommodate such a...
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The Affective Index in Video’s Depiction of Desire
In the visual arts, the domain of emotional attachment has always comprised at least two aesthetic horizons. One operates in the role of mirror, the other of prism, or perhaps kaleidoscope. The first,...
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Hedi Slimane, Cultural Barometer
Pacific Design Center for Hedi Slimane California Song exhibit There was a time not long ago when what we could call the critical elite would, from a historical perch, peer down on the creative voice...
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Manifest and Latent Reflections on Art and Art Basel
I. Manifest As with so many other event cities that for a few days blossom into urban art constellations, it was time again to engage in that uncanny bit of ethnography called Art Basel Miami Beach....
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Anne Spalter’s Scenes from the North Pole of Transcendence
I. Nearly thirty years ago, Rosalind Krauss produced the preeminent analysis of the singular structure most unique to, most resonant with, and most emblematic of the aims of modern art – the grid. What...
View ArticleNot Inside Dave Van Ronk – Film Review of the Coen Bros “Inside Llewyn Davis”
Of the many perils that await biopic films, perhaps the greatest are willful detours from the truth. The journey of every artist as he or she struggles for success becomes replete with indelible...
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