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

Our recent and deplorable obsession with e-mail often seems to have obscured e-art and e-culture, but Peter Lunenfeld will lead us back into the light. As he explains in the first chapter, "'Snap to grid' instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space". Lunenfeld, director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics, has snapped his analysis of how technology, aesthetics and cultural theory impact upon one another to "the grid of critical theory". He does not shirk this Herculean task, taking the long and historical view and beginning with the kinetograph through to the early stirrings of cinema and moving swiftly on to the "technovolksgeist", the new media artists of the 1990s and their relationship to the others who occupy a similar space: hackers, phreakers and the like. Nothing escapes his eagle eye, neither videogames nor performance artists such as Stelarc. The book doesn't stop at mere examination--Lunenfeld wants to know what effect these new digital art forms will have on the existing art world and its discourses. He even seeks to show how they'll fit into contemporary politics, questioning the assumption that "the failed revolutions of [1968] so demoralised the avante-garde that all cultural production since then has been irrevocably altered". Nonsense, says Lunenfeld--just look around you. --Liz BaileyRead More