Customer Reviews

Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)

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Anna Munster, an artist and professor in Sydney, Australia, complicates and critiques celebratory accounts of technology based on the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. Her approach in 'Materializing New Media' detaches commentary on technology, and digital culture in particular, from narratives of technological progress--the idea that today's innovations are necessarily better than innovations in the past. Instead, she seeks to recover past concepts of technology through contemporary artistic engagements with digital culture. For example, in the second chapter she examines seventeenth-century Wunderkammer ("wonder-rooms" that housed collections of exotic artifacts from art to objects of natural history) as a predecessor to today's experience of surfing the Internet: both practices, she claims, invite a sense of wonder that engage our bodies with the surrounding world. Natural order and progress, symptoms of the celebratory accounts of technology, are downplayed so that her readers, like artists, see a digital environment more conducive to exploring their relationship with the world.

As an artist, Munster brings a fresh take to academic accounts of technology. She cites a number of artists working on the boundary between science and art, a position that enlivens the hackneyed images of technology promoted in the mainstream media. However, readers may find her language challenging at times. If you have a working knowledge of Deleuze and Guatarri, Leibniz, or Donna Haraway, you may find her language stimulating: such terms as "affect," " the fold," "faciality,' and "embodiment" play key roles in her text. But, if you are like myself, and prefer more accessible language, you may need to spend more time with the text. Nevertheless, she provides enough examples through historical research and contemporary art that readers will likely generate their own ideas about new media and the ethics emerging out of our engagement with digital technology.

I'm a fast reader. I don't like to spend more than a week or two on a single book. This one particularly is not too long but it is too complex and too deep: just not my style. I gave up after 50 pages.

This book is a virtuoso performance in its feminist exploration of the concerns of new media and the concept of embodiment.