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

Lunenfeld, Peter

  • 3.68 out of 5 stars
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9780262122269: Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 026212226X ISBN 13: 9780262122269
Publisher: Mit Pr, 2000

Synopsis

In Snap to Grid, an idiosyncratic guide to the interactive, telematic era, Peter Lunenfeld maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His clear-eyed evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion--informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory--of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. "Snap to grid" is a command that instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space. Users regularly disable this function the moment they open an application because the gains in predictability and accuracy are balanced against the losses of ambiguity and expressiveness. Lunenfeld uses "snap to grid" as a metaphor for how we manipulate and think about the electronic culture that enfolds us. In this book he snaps his seduction by the machine to the grid of critical thinking.How can we compare new media to established media? Must we revert to a default dichotomy between utopia and desolation, the notion that media, even digital media, by themselves can redeem or damn us? As he answers these and other questions, Lunenfeld takes into account the post-1989 politico-economic context in which new media have developed and grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of production. Artists discussed include Mark Amerika, Char Davies, Hollis Frampton, William Gibson, Gary Hill, Perry Hobermann, JODI, Christian Möller, Adam Ross, Jennifer Steinkamp, Stelarc, and Diana Thater.

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About the Author

Peter Lunenfeld is Director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA), founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group, and a coordinator of the graduate program in Communication and New Media Design at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He is the editor of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press, 1999).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Mit Pr
Publication date
2000
Language
English
ISBN 10 
026212226X
ISBN 13 
9780262122269
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
226
Rating
  • 3.68 out of 5 stars
    22 ratings by Goodreads

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780262621588: Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  0262621584 ISBN 13:  9780262621588
Publisher: MIT Press, 2001
Softcover