The aesthetic nature and purposes of computer culture in the contemporary world are investigated in this book. Sean Cubitt casts a cool eye on the claims of cybertopians, tracing the globalization of the new medium and enquiring into its effects on subjectivity and sociality. Drawing on historical scholarship, philosophical aesthetics and the literature of cyberculture, the author argues for a genuine democracy beyond the limitations of the free market and the global corporation. Digital arts are identified as having a vital part to play in this process. Written in a balanced and penetrating style, the book both conveniently summarizes a huge literature and sets a new agenda for research and theory.

An art-historical perspective on interactive media art that provides theoretical and methodological tools for understanding and analyzing digital art. Since the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator have received extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present a challenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aesthetic experience enabled by these new media works can open up new perspectives for our understanding of art and media alike. Kwastek, herself an art historian, offers a set of theoretical and methodological tools that are suitable for understanding and analyzing not only new media art but also other contemporary art forms. Addressing both the theoretician and the practitioner, Kwastek provides an introduction to the history and the terminology of interactive art, a theory of the aesthetics of interaction, and exemplary case studies of interactive media art. Kwastek lays the historical and theoretical groundwork and then develops an aesthetics of interaction, discussing such aspects as real space and data space, temporal structures, instrumental and phenomenal perspectives, and the relationship between materiality and interpretability. Finally, she applies her theory to specific works of interactive media art, including narratives in virtual and real space, interactive installations, and performance—with case studies of works by Olia Lialina, Susanne Berkenheger, Stefan Schemat, Teri Rueb, Lynn Hershman, Agnes Hegedüs, Tmema, David Rokeby, Sonia Cillari, and Blast Theory.

Postdigital Aesthetics is a contribution to questions raised by our newly computational everyday lives and the aesthetics which reflect both the postdigital nature of this age, but also critical perspectives of a post-internet world.

Argues we are in a post-digital moment, where the blurring between the "real" and the "digital" has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world.

Everything you need to know about new media in one accessible, easy to navigate volume! From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Theft Auto to Second Life - this book explores new media’s most important issues and debates in an accessible and engaging text for newcomers to the field. With technological change continuing to unfold at an incredible rate, Digital Cultures rounds-up major events in the media’s recent past to help develop a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical debates that surround this emerging discipline. It addresses issues such as: What is new media? How is new media changing our lives? Is new media having a positive or negative effect on culture and human communication? Each chapter contains case studies which provide an interesting and lively balance between the well-trodden and the newly emerging themes in the field. Topics covered include digital television, digital cinema, gaming, digital democracy, mobile phones, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networking, music and multimedia, virtual communities and the digital divide. Digital Cultures is an essential introductory guide for all media and communication studies students, as well as those with a general interest in new media and its impact on the world around us.

Digital technology has transformed the way that we visualise the natural world, the art we create and the stories we tell about our environments. Exploring contemporary digital art and literature through an ecocritical lens, Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (1968 - 2018) demonstrates the many ways in which critical ideas of the sublime, the pastoral and the picturesque have been renewed and shaped in digital media, from electronic literature to music and the visual arts. The book goes on to explore the ecological implications of these new forms of cultural representation in the digital age and in so doing makes a profound contribution to our understanding of digital art practice in the 21st century.

This volume explores the relationship between aesthetics and traditional multimodal communication to show how all semiotic resources, not just those situated within fine arts, have an aesthetic function. Bringing together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of researchers, the book meditates on the role of aesthetics in a broader range of semiotic resources, including urban spaces, blogs, digital scrapbooks, children’s literature, music, and online learning environments. The result is a comprehensive collection of new perspectives on how communication and aesthetics enrich and complement one another when meaning is made with semiotic resources, making this key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, fine arts, education studies, and visual culture.