Database Aesthetics
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Database Aesthetics

Art in the Age of Information Overflow

Victoria Vesna

Table of Contents

Database Aesthetics

$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

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