Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures - Softcover

Lunenfeld, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262621584 ISBN 13: 9780262621588

Publisher: MIT Press, 2001

Synopsis

A vibrant guide to the artistic, cultural, and social faces of the new media.

In Snap to Grid, an idiosyncratic guide to the interactive, telematic era, Peter Lunenfeld maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His clear-eyed evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion―informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory―of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. "Snap to grid" is a command that instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space. Users regularly disable this function the moment they open an application because the gains in predictability and accuracy are balanced against the losses of ambiguity and expressiveness. Lunenfeld uses "snap to grid" as a metaphor for how we manipulate and think about the electronic culture that enfolds us. In this book he snaps his seduction by the machine to the grid of critical thinking. How can we compare new media to established media? Must we revert to a default dichotomy between utopia and desolation, the notion that media, even digital media, by themselves can redeem or damn us? As he answers these and other questions, Lunenfeld takes into account the post-1989 politico-economic context in which new media have developed and grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of production. Artists discussed include Mark Amerika, Char Davies, Hollis Frampton, William Gibson, Gary Hill, Perry Hobermann, JODI, Christian Möller, Adam Ross, Jennifer Steinkamp, Stelarc, and Diana Thater.

About this title

Review:

Where were you in '89? A better question may be: where have we been going since the Berlin Wall fell while, at the same time, hundreds of interdisciplinary walls dissolved in the face of new technological solutions. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures explores these changes as they affect how we think about and react to the world through our computer-generated filters.

Author Peter Lunenfeld, director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics, is well-versed in the scope of new art and design, incorporating painting, architecture, and writing in his critique as well as the expected software, virtual reality, and computer-based installations.

The first part of the book, "Cultures," examines the interactions and economics of new art and business, and how each contributes to the development and implementation of new technologies and creates a need for what Lunenfeld calls "real-time theory." Next, in "Media," is a brief discussion of the confluence of new or reinvigorated art forms. The book thoroughly explains and illustrates the state of the art in hypertext, digital photography, the Web, virtual reality, and hybrid architecture. Finally, "Makers" profiles the theory and works of six artists emblematic of the changes seen in recent years. Individuals such as filmmaker Hollis Frampton, video artist Diana Thater, and installation artist Jennifer Steinkamp show us the new world we're creating using the tools of its creation.

Eschewing the academic reliance on jargon to obscure meaning and cull the readership, the book strives for more direct communication--even including a brief glossary at the end. Snap to Grid can be read equally well as criticism, history, and futurism--thus completing the circle of influence from technology to art to theory. --Rob Lightner

About the Author:

Peter Lunenfeld is Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0262621584
• ISBN 13: 9780262621588
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240