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Distributed for Intellect Ltd

Context Providers

Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning. The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared, creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging the scientific community through collaboration, active dialogue, and creative work that challenges the scientific.


350 pages | 70 halftones | 7 x 9 | © 2011

Media Studies


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Reviews

“Media art is not just an art form that utilizes media technology, as people tend to think. This excellent volume, written by pioneers in the field, explores its real meanings to us and our society with ample examples and theoretical insight. Such a book has been long needed.”

Machiko Kusahara, Waseda University, Tokyo

“For decades, it seems, there has been debate about the technological basis of so-called new media art. In this enlightening volume, the editors have enlisted a comprehensive body of opinion by theorists and practitioners to present one complex answer—it’s the context, stupid.”

Steve Dietz, founder and artistic director at Northern Lights, an media-oriented art agency

The essays in Context Providers are rich with observations from artists, educators, humanists, scientists, and curators who address the recent histories of digital media and the ways in which media art and culture challenge and reframe ways of constructing meaning through the creative process and people’s engagement with it. They are supplemented by notes and references and, when illustrated, are annotated with captions that offer further commentary.”

Choice

Table of Contents

Introduction
 
Part One
Defining Conditions for Digital Arts: Social Function, Authorship, and Audience
      Margot Lovejoy
Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art
      Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken
Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art
      Sharon Daniel
Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges
      Mary Flanagan
Part Two
Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production
      Christiane Paul
Aesthetics of Information Visualization
      Warren Sack
Identity Operated In New Mode: Context and Body/Space/Time
      Marina Gržinić
Game Engines As Creative Frameworks
      Robert F. Nideffer
Mapping the Collective
      Sara Diamond
Part Three
Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios
      Victoria Vesna
Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm
      Anna Munster
Working With Wetware
      Ruth G. West
Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications
      Ellen K. Levy
Art and Science Research: Active Contexts and Discourses
      Jill Scott and Daniel Bisig
 
Index
Biographies

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