Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

While new media (art that uses quickly changing technology) has received much scholarly attention, the branch of new media that is specifically interactive (art that employs technology in the direct engagement of viewers) has received far less attention. In part this is because the experiential nature of the work prevents the illusion of scholarly objectivity. Kwastek (Ludwig-Maximilians Univ., Munich) has developed a methodology that embraces both personal experience and the intentions of the artist, while avoiding one of the key pitfalls of new media--the quick obsolescence of scholarship about it. The only part of Kwastek's book that is potentially vulnerable to this phenomenon is the final chapter featuring case studies dedicated to ten artists; the bulk of the book approaches interactivity through well-established theories ranging from John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) and Umberto Eco's Opera Aperta (The Open Work; 1962) to Jack Burnham's system aesthetics and Wolfgang Iser's contingency. The notion of play is also employed, as is performativity. Despite a focus on theory Kwastek intends this book to be accessible, and is for the most part successful; the writing is not as dense as Dieter Daniels's foreword suggests. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. E. K. Mix Butler University