[artinfo] (fwd/new book) Art and Activism on the Net

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: "Leonardo/ISAST" <isast at leonardo.info>
To: <leonardo-isast at mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 15:58:09 -0700


NEW from The Leonardo Book Series and MIT Press

AT A DISTANCE: PRECURSORS TO ART AND ACTIVISM ON THE INTERNET

Edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark

Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the Internet. In this
multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a
distance -- geographical, temporal, or emotional -- theorists and
practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally
reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and
1980s. By providing a context for this work -- showing that it was shaped by
varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies, and political and
aesthetic concerns -- AT A DISTANCE effectively refutes the widely accepted
idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides
the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today's
practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities
inherent in networked practice.

AT A DISTANCE traces the history and theory of such experimental art
projects as Mail Art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings, and
Fluxus. Although the projects differed, a conceptual questioning of the "art
object," combined with a political undermining of dominant art institutional
practices, animated most distance art. After a section that sets this work
in historical and critical perspective, the book presents artists and others
involved in this art "re-viewing" their work -- including experiments in
"mini-FM," telerobotics, networked psychoanalysis, and interactive book
construction. Finally, the book recasts the history of networks from the
perspectives of politics, aesthetics, economics, and cross-cultural analysis.

Annmarie Chandler is Director of Emerging Field in New Media and Digital
Culture at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Norie Neumark is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Production at
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

To order this book and to learn more about other titles in the Leonardo Book
Series please visit the Leonardo Book Series website at: http://lbs.mit.edu.