Synthetic Times: Media Art China (Paperback)

~ Fan Di'an (Editor), Zhang Ga (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Out of Now traces the practice of one of the great artists of our time. With immense courage, Tehching Hsieh revolutionized performance art: while many were sprinting, he did marathons. Hsieh anticipated our times, in that he made time his medium. This impressive and beautifully written book offers the first comprehensive study of an outstanding body of work. An extraordinary performance!"
—Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery

"Tehching Hsieh has created a profound body of 'lifeworks' that integrate the live with the aesthetic, producing hybrid experiences that question the very nature of what we call 'art.' This brilliant book, which includes documentation and smart, poetic, and historically inflected writing by Heathfield is an invaluable record of Hsieh’s work. A unique commentary on the writing of the histories of art and performance."
—Amelia Jones, Professor and Pilkington Chair, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

We live in a world that operates on bits and bytes. Reality has become synthetic, a convergence of the material and the immaterial. The synthetic power of new media art—integrative, interdisciplinary, interactive—expresses the blurred boundary between the physical and the digital. Synthetic Times collects new media art created since 2001 by artists and art collectives from nearly thirty countries. These innovative and groundbreaking works investigate how we perceive reality and what it means to be human on the threshold of human-machine symbiosis.

The artworks in Synthetic Times (which accompanies a milestone exhibition at the National Art Museum in China, an Olympics Cultural Project) explore a trajectory of uncanny visions ranging from the desire to transcend the corporal to the construction of synthetic worlds; from telematic dreaming to transgenic hybrids; from whimsical apparatuses to the deadpan gaze of magnetic fields. They reveal the tension between man and machine, between the animated and the inert, rekindling a discourse about relationships between nature and culture, the perceived and the imagined. Essays by leading new media theorists accompany the artworks, and an appendix documents additional programs held in conjunction with the exhibition.

Essays: Jordan Crandall, Oliver Grau, Erkii Huhtamo, Caroline A. Jones, Friedrich Kittler, Arthur Kroker, Mike Stubbs, Peter Weibel, Zhang Ga

Artists: 1000 Cell Phones Team, AL and AL, Blendid, Jean-Michel Bruyère, Rejane Cantoni, Aristarkh Chernyshev, Convergeo + Media and Design Lab, Luvc Courchesne, Du Zhenjun, etoy, exonemo, f18 institute, Paula Gaetano Adi, Usman Haque, Edwin van der Heide, Kurt Hentschläger, Mateusz Herczka, Christoph Hillebrand, Daniel Palacios Jiménez, Kichul Kim, Knowbotic Research, Daniela Kutschat Hanns, Paul Lincoln, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chico MacMurtrie, Eva and Franco Mattes, Anthony McCall, Henrik Menné, Miao Xiaochun, Yves Netzhammer, Marnix de Nijs, Magdalena Pederin, David Rokeby, Mariana Rondon, Bengt Sjölén, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Stelarc, Sissel Tolaas, Transmute Collective, Tsai Wen-Ying, VERDENSTEATRET, Marek Walczak, Martin Wattenberg, Herwig Weiser, Wu Juehui, Xu Bing, Xu Zhongmin

Copublished with the National Art Museum of China

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Product Details

• Paperback: 358 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262512262
• ISBN-13: 978-0262512268
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,288,662 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fabulous journey, June 19, 2009

By	Caitlyn Pascal "thetastates.com" (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Hardcover)

Not only does this book take you through the works of this artist, but it also takes you through their life.
The book is brilliantly assembled to evoke the mindset and focus of an artist whose scope and execution are beyond our immediate comprehension. From our initial reaction to the repetition of the documentation, we eventually translate that to the temporal space that these works occupied.

This book is a giddy delight and will not dissapoint anyone who has been intruiged by any of Tehching Hsiesh's works. Highly recommended for anyone who likes the intersections of conceptual art and performance art. Think of the early works of Chris Burden, but stretched out a thousand times in length.