Database Aesthetics Art in the Age of Information Overflow Victoria Vesna Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4119-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4119-2 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4118-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4118-5
Discovering the role of data in creating a new way of experiencing—and making—art. Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life. “Victoria Vesna’s edited anthology Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow provides a compelling collection of 16 essays that engage the shifting aesthetics of computational and interactive art forms. Database Aesthetics supplies the reader with an absorbing and diverse cross-section of stylistic, analytical and theoretical examinations of the meaning of the database to interactive (and, in some cases, traditional) media. Furthermore, it showcases several practical instances of artworks configured using databases and provides the reader with valuable insights from the artists into the design, implementation and execution of these projects. It offers a number of intellectually robust, rewarding and thought-provoking approaches for those already immersed in digital culture and its critical discourses. This book serves as a timely and valuable resource for both the classroom and beyond.” —Discourse Contributors: Sharon Daniel, Steve Deitz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Legrady, Eduardo Kac, Norman Klein, John Klima, Lev Manovich, Robert F. Nideffer, Nancy Paterson, Christiane Paul, Marko Peljhan, Warren Sack, Bill Seaman, Grahame Weinbren. Victoria Vesna is a media artist, and professor and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. 336 pages | 60 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2007 Electronic Mediations Series, volume 20 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction by Victoria Vesna Part I. Database Aesthetics 1. Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand: The Database Aesthetics of Everything Victoria Vesna 2. Database as Symbolic Form Lev Manovich 3. Ocean, Database, Recut Grahame Weinbren 4. Waiting for the World to Explode: How Data Converts Into a Novel Norman Klein 5. The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives Christiane Paul 6. The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0 Steve Dietz 7. Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics Bill Seaman 8. The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity Sharon Daniel 9. Network Aesthetics Warren Sack 10. Game Engines as Embedded Systems Robert F. Nideffer Part II. Artists and Data Projects 11. Stock Market Skirt: The Evolution of the Internet, the Interface and an Idea Nancy Paterson 12. Pockets Full of Memories George Legrady 13. The Raw Data Diet, All Consuming Bodies, and the Shape of Things to Come Lynn Hershman-Leeson 14. Time Capsule: Networking the Biological [Biotech and Trauma] Eduardo Kac 15. Aesthetics of ecosystm John Klima 16. Polar Marko Peljhan Publication History Contributors Index