Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

Electronic Mediations

by Roberto Simanowski

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done.


Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, Simanowski deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world.


Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.

Genres: Art, Unfinished, Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Roberto Simanowski is a German scholar of media and cultural studies and the author of Digital Art and Meaning, Data Love, Facebook Society, Waste: A New Media Primer, and The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (the last two published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Robert]

This book looks very promising. A book that addresses text, meaning, and digital art but isn't committed to electronic literature as the only form worth discussing. My first glance through with the library book was o.k., but now I own a copy! We will see....