The New Media Reader (Mit Press) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262232278 ISBN 13: 9780262232272

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2003

Synopsis

A sourcebook of historical written texts, video documentation, and working programs that form the foundation of new media.

This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs―many of them now almost impossible to find―that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II―when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared―and the emergence of the World Wide Web―when they entered the mainstream of public life. The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.

About this title

About the Author:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the coeditor of four collections published by the MIT Press: with Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003); with Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004),Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009).

Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).

Review:

A stunner...

―Brian Kim Stefans , New York Fine Arts Quarterly

The New Media Reader...is my if-you-can-only-take-one pick for a computer history vacation suitcase-stuffer.

―Michael Swaine , Dr. Dobb's Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0262232278
• ISBN 13: 9780262232272
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 840
• Editor: Wardrip-Fruin Noah, Montfort Nick