Sat, 02 Sep 2006
New Media Art
Mark Tribe, Reena Jana,
New Media Art, Taschen
One has to beware slightly of the utterings of arts writers.
It's a field where bucketloads of bullshit aren't unknown and
where a critical voice is raised it can be met by patronising
reactions. It can all be a bit Emperor's Clothesish... like its
sister, the world of fashion (of which it is largely part).
This particular book is quite interesting and highlights
a few of the things that have been happening over
the last few years, particularly on the web. And there is also
a rub - the fandom for Open Source ideas, which is admittedly
not too overdone. The basic idea here is that people might share
intellectual resources in their projects which might be software,
music, or art, but could be almost anything. This idea has
been extended by some to mean that no-one should be able to
own these things which makes for a philosophical backing for
pirate downloading of music or film for example. This also
has made for reactions on the other side, by Big Business
mostly, that are equally annoying.
Anyway, there are quite a few projects to browse through
in this book. Each has some pictures as well as a generous
writeup and it is in one of Taschen's cheaper ranges and
could serve as inspiration, or at the least, inspiration
for a reasonable web browsing session as most projects have
website URLs given.
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