Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Critical Issues in Electronic Media is an interdisciplinary sourcebook that offers new critical perspectives directly related to, or arising from, the practice of electronic media art. It sketches the changing topology of culture as it enters electronic space and specifically addresses questions of art practice in that space. Some of the contributions focus on the dynamics of specific emerging media such as interactive media, while others look at the cultural conditions formed by, and forming around, new technological complexes. Still others examine contemporary technocultural manifestations against a background of social and technological history.



The contributors are professionally and geographically diverse, representing professional fields such as computer graphics, video, sound, drama, and visual arts as well as media, cultural and literary theory, and the social sciences. Together, these essays provide a rich survey of contemporary technological critique and offer a perspective on creative practice in technological media.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Suck on This, Planet of Noise!
• 2 In/Quest of Presence: Virtuality, Aurality, and Television's Gulf War
• 3 Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace
• 4 Technology is the People's Friend: Computers, Class, and the New Cultural Politics
• 5 Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production
• 6 Virtual Worlds: Fascination and Reactions
• 7 Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media
• 8 Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion
• 9 Image, Language, and Belief in Synthesis
• 10 Track Organology
• 11 On Monitors and Men and Other Unsolved Feminine Mysteries: Video Technology and the Feminine
• 12 The Irresistible Interface: Video's Unknown Forces and Fire-Lit Waves
• 13 One Video Theory (some assembly required)
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index