In Snap to Grid, an idiosyncratic guide to the interactive, telematic era, Peter Lunenfeld maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His clear-eyed evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion--informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory--of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. "Snap to grid" is a command that instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space. Users regularly disable this function the moment they open an application because the gains in predictability and accuracy are balanced against the losses of ambiguity and expressiveness. Lunenfeld uses "snap to grid" as a metaphor for how we manipulate and think about the electronic culture that enfolds us. In this book he snaps his seduction by the machine to the grid of critical thinking.How can we compare new media to established media? Must we revert to a default dichotomy between utopia and desolation, the notion that media, even digital media, by themselves can redeem or damn us? As he answers these and other questions, Lunenfeld takes into account the post-1989 politico-economic context in which new media have developed and grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of production. Artists discussed include Mark Amerika, Char Davies, Hollis Frampton, William Gibson, Gary Hill, Perry Hobermann, JODI, Christian Möller, Adam Ross, Jennifer Steinkamp, Stelarc, and Diana Thater.
Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. He has a B.A. in history from Columbia University, an MA in Media Studies from SUNY Buffalo, and a Ph.D. from UCLA in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA.
He has published four books, and over 70 articles in venues ranging from Artforum to New Media & Society, from Adobe's Think Tank portal to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review. His work has been translated into eight languages. Afterimage referred to the edited collection The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT, 1999) as "the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there," and the volume has served as an important resource for those codifying new media studies. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media & Cultures (MIT, 2000) was adopted as a model of how to meld disciplinary rigor with detailed attention to individual works and makers, and was covered in venues as diverse as Italy's Flash Art and Britain's New Scientist, the latter concluding its featured review by saying that artists working with digital technologies "now have their bible, their Stones of Venice, their Ways of Seeing." USER: InfoTechnoDemo (MIT, 2005) pushes the linkages between critical analysis and formal experimentation to new limits. Johanna Drucker writes that USER "begs to be compared with the landmark 1966 collaboration by Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel, and Marshall McLuhan that resulted in The Medium is the Massage."
He is creator and editorial director of the multi-award-winning Mediawork project, a pamphlet series for the MIT Press which redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. These "theoretical fetish objects" cover the intersections of media, art, design and technology. The pamphlets have been discussed everywhere from the New York Review of Books to Entertainment Weekly, and have won awards for both writing and design. Lev Manovich, lauded these 100+ page "mind bombs" as "a new operating system for the book." The project is supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeffrey and Catharine Soros. They include Utopian Entrepreneur (2001) by Brenda Laurel, designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp; Writing Machines (2002) by N. Katherine Hayles, designed by Anne Burdick; Rhythm Science (2004) by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, designed by COMA; and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling, designed by Lorraine Wild (2005).
His current research interests are taking him deeper into questions about new modes of knowledge formation that go beyond print, the design of the digital humanities, and the centrality of meaning making to digital culture. His forthcoming monograph is The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. Recently, he has held fellowships at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, and in the Vectors program at the USC Annenberg Center. http://www.peterlunenfeld.com
