new book

MediaArtHistories, Edited by Oliver Grau; with contributions by Rudolf
Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt,
Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas
Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev
Manovich, W. J. T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul,
Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford and Peter
Weibel.

Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet
to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is
rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or
other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars
seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it
against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that
today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone;
it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood
in proximity to other disciplines--film, cultural and media studies,
computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images.

Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from
thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century
phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to
Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They
reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms--machine, media,
exhibition--and consider the blurred dividing lines between art
products and consumer products and between art images and science
images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an
interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the trained
eye of art history.

Oliver Grau is Professor for Image Science and Dean of the Department
for Cultural Studies, Danube University Krems. He is the author of
Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT Press, 2003), editor of
Mediale Emotionen (2005) and founder of the pioneering international
digital art archive www.virtualart.at.

MediaArtHistories, Cambridge/Mass. MIT-Press 2007
http://www.mediaarthistories.org/pub/mediaarthistories.html