network culture

Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.

From early modern texts to “publishing events,” Madeleine Monson-Rosen’s review follows Matt Cohen’s exploration of the “networked wilderness.” It turns out that the English colonists and native Americans were already information theorists, centuries before cybernetics emerged at MIT.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/wild)

Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.

Contributors: Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York. 

(Source: University of Minnesota Press catalogue)

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse how the contents and the structures of the Anglo-American novel have been influenced by the emergence of digital and telematic media during the last two decades. One of the primary targets is to identify the common strategies adopted by electronic and printed novels to analyze the complexity and to try, at the same time, to escape from the “trap” of language. In my introduction I argue about the increasing relevance of the pattern/randomness dialectic into the narrative field. In the first chapter, while analysing the two novels Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers and Exegesis (1997) by Astro Teller, I try to show how computational practices are affecting the literary fruition and authorship along with the role that the novel might play as an instrument of knowledge and cultural interaction. In the subsequent chapters I bring together literary analysis and network culture, focusing on different notions such as the database as a symbolic form, the properties of connectionist networks, the idea of transliteracy and the concepts of autopoiesis and exopoiesis. For this very reason, I examined five different works: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's Flight Paths (2007) and The Unknown (1998), developed by Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt. These literary texts propose different strategies to assimilate the structures and the dynamics proper to the networks in order to create new cognitive paradigms. It would seem that, through specific narrative structures and topics, some of the novelists of the last fifteen years are abandoning the self-reflexivity typical of the previous postmodern tradition in order to suggest an idea of fiction as an instrument to connect individual and contingency, reader and text, text and media ecology.

Source: author's abstract

An answer to the Danish Ministry of Culture for their project "Art in the Networked Society".
Follow the discussion with the Ministry of Culture online: http://kum.dk

The book examines the way digital technology is forcing a complete rethink of creative priorities for artists in the twenty first century. Written from an artist's perspective, the author has had the cooperation of many important practitioners in digital arts in countries across the world. The book is written in an accessible style and alongside examples of work offers practical know-how that will enable to reader to begin using some of the methods described for themselves.The Fundamentals of Digital Art has six sections and each of these takes a specific aspect of the subject.Historical perspectivesDynamic “live” artThe use of data sources in artThe place of programming languagesNetwork considerationsHybrid practice and the blurring of specialist boundaries.176 Pages with 150 colour illustrations

Source: book presentation on accompanying website

The increasing presence of digital media forms our new understanding of community and calls for a closer examination of the culture of networks we are participating in. A central point of interest concerning our culture becomes the convergance of Arts, Entertainment, and Digital Interactive Media Technologies. These change the way we perceive arts, daily news or have an impact on how we communicate with each other. In his new book, Roberto Simanowski refers to Gerhard Schulze's socio-logical theory of the Event Society (Erlebnisgesellschaft, 1992), observing that nowadays social events ostensibly take place on the Internet. Along with discussions on the politics of the World Wide Web and its participatory values, Simanowski focuses on the significance of digital media in artistic practices. He considers interactive art as a key to the understanding of the event society. Choosing a hermeneutic approach to analyse "processing signs" in arts, Simanowski defends participatory art against Adorno's notion of distraction. The author prooves, in a number of case studies, that interactive art calls for both immersion and cognitive reflection.