Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING]

Lunenfeld, Peter

ISBN 10: 026212226X / ISBN 13: 9780262122269

Published by MIT Press (MA), Cambridge, MA, 2000

About this Item

Fine in fine dust jacket. SIGNED and inscribed by author on first free endpaper. 1st edition, 1st printing. Essentially as new. Signed copies are rare. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 252 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. The author is a critic and theorist of digital media and a professor in the Design|Media Arts department at UCLA, director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA), and founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Group. Lunenfeld is a leading figure in digital aesthetic theory, set on establishing philosophical quandaries regarding digital technology and its role in art, design and culture. Where possible, all books come with dust jacket in a clear protective plastic sleeve, sealed in a ziplock bag, wrapped in bubble wrap, shipped in a box.

Seller Inventory # Alibris.0002117

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING]
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA), Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026212226X
• ISBN 13: 9780262122269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

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.

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).