Digital Baroque
 


Digital Baroque

New Media Art and Cinematic Folds

Timothy Murray

Digital Baroque

$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3402-6

$75.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3401-9

 

A surprising and original application of theories of new media art.

In this intellectually groundbreaking work, Timothy Murray investigates a paradox embodied in the book’s title: What is the relationship between digital, in the form of new media art, and baroque, a highly developed early modern philosophy of art? Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts.

Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts’ dialogue with early modern concepts. Among the works discussed are digitally oriented films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker; video installations by Thierry Kuntzel, Keith Piper, and Renate Ferro; and interactive media works by Toni Dove, David Rokeby, and Jill Scott. Sophisticated readings reveal the electronic psychosocial webs and digital representations that link text, film, and computer.

Murray puts forth an innovative Deleuzian psychophilosophical approach—one that argues that understanding new media art requires a fundamental conceptual shift from linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.

Timothy Murray is director of the Society for the Humanities, curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and professor of comparative literature at Cornell University.

320 pages | 22 b&w photos | 6 x 9 | December 2008
Electronic Mediations Series, volume 26