Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history. Contributors Rudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel

The digital revolution fundamentally changed how cultural heritage is created, documented, analyzed, and preserved. The book focuses on this transformation’s impact. How must museums and archives meet the challenges of digitally generated cultures and how does the digital revolution influence traditional object collection, research, and education? How do digital technologies and digital art and culture affect our interaction with images? Leading international experts from various disciplines break new ground. Pioneering interdisciplinary research results collected in this book are relevant to education, curators and archivists in the arts and culture sector and in the digital humanities.

This collection of critical essays investigates an emergent and increasingly important field of cultural production in Latin America: cyberliterature and cyberculture in their varying manifestations, including blogs and hypertext narratives, collective novels and e-mags, digital art and short Net-films. Highly innovative in its conception, this book provides the first sustained academic focus on this area of cultural production, and investigates the ways in which cyberliterature and cyberculture in the broadest sense are providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices, and even political agency, for Latin Americans. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first comprises eight chapters on the broad area of cyberculture and identity formation/preservation including the development of different types of cybercommunities in Latin America. While many of the chapters applaud the creative potential of these new virtual communities, identities and cultural products to create networks across boundaries and offer new contestatory strategies, they also consider whether such phenomena may risk reinforcing existing social inequalities or perpetuate conservatism. The second section comprises six chapters and an afterword that deal with the nature of cyberliterature in all its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural legacies of writers such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to traditional print literature from the region that reflects on the subject of new technology, to weblogs and hypertext and hypermedia fiction proper.

The papers collected in this volume document the exchange and development of ideas that comprised the 5th Global Conference on Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and Science Fiction, hosted at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom, in July 2010.