This book explores the tensions between aesthetics, gender, and disability in contemporary digital media installations and performance art. Notions of agency and subjectivity are connected to four contemporary political issues (artificial intelligence, migration and political violence, contemporary medical technologies and practices, and the Anthropocene) and analyzed against a Western legacy of utopian and dystopian ideas and desires that have shaped, and continue to shape, what it means to be human. The book’s main argument is that agency and subjectivity are not universal attributes; rather they are socio-material entanglements and contextually bound enactments that are strategically negotiated by the subject. Thus, they involve conflict, struggle, and other forms of resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, media and cultural studies, disability studies, and gender studies.

This book explores the tensions between aesthetics, gender and disability in contemporary digital media installations and performance art. Notions of agency and subjectivity are connected to four contemporary political issues (artificial intelligence; migration and political violence; contemporary medical technologies and practices; the Anthropocene) and analyzed against a Western legacy of utopian and dystopian ideas and desires that have shaped, and continue to shape, what it means to be human. The book's main argument is that agency and subjectivity are not universal attributes; rather they are socio-material entanglements and contextually bound enactments that are strategically negotiated by the subject. Thus, they involve conflict, struggle and other forms of resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, media and cultural studies, disability studies, and gender studies.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

DIVThe first full-length survey of contemporary Chicana artists/div

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.

Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.