Digital Art and Meaning begins by responding to Roy Ascott’s concept of “telematic embrace,” challenging the general proclivity to assign production of meaning solely to an artwork’s audience; to the contrary, this book boldly proclaims how it “embraces the advances of the critic.” In various ways, Roberto Simanowski precisely uses his pro-critical stance to assemble a rejection of the common notions of “embrace” that occur as media and art are blended, establishing a polemic that privileges a “methodology” of close reading that resists its more imposing or absolutist implications.

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