Nothing about this book looks like an art book. The somewhat colorless cover, the MIT imprint, the marked lack of giant, colorful images. At very first glance, you know that editor Oliver Grau, an Image Science professor and Cultural Studies dean, means business.
Media Art Histories is a more academic look at a subject normally approached with thin, glossy coffee table books and broad, superficial language. Grau’s compilation offers takes from over a dozen professionals on the history and acceptance of digital media as an art form.
The book is broken down into for major sections, each with a small handful of black and white images. The first section covers the origins of media art, which go much farther back than you might expect. Particularly interesting is Guanalan Nadarajan’s discussion of 13th century Islamic automation technology. You may not have realized that the idea of automata and robotics stretched back so far in history, but this history played a major role in more recent programming technology, without which we would have no digital art. Other contributors to this section of the book cite Marcel Duchamp’s innovative work, kinetics, algorithms, and other historical developments that have had a surprising influence on today’s media.
The next section introduces lectures on exhibition and interactivity of digital art. And it is here that it suddenly clicks… digital art isn’t given the same acceptance that other art forms have. In this is the reason for Grau’s academic take on media art. With more rigorous attention and historical literature, maybe we’ll see media art go from the crazy experimental stepchild of traditional art and gain valid recognition and attention of its own.
Of the several essays in this section, Ryszard W. Kluszcynski’s on film and interactive art is quite interesting and easy to relate to. In it, he discusses filmmakers’ slow move to digital (“electronic cinema”) and how it relates to installations, video games, the Internet, and virtual reality.
The remaining sections, Pop Meets Science and Image Science, lead the book into more abstract territory that may be a little harder to get your head around. However, I quite enjoyed Machiko Kusahara’s essay on Device Art—a Japanese concept with which I was totally unfamiliar. The writing talks about how Device Art engages viewers in the nature of technology, and also the overall Japanese perspective on media art. What few images are here are the most interesting, I find, in the book.
Other essays in these later sections are quite heavy (“There Are No Visual Media,” for example), but still offer unique and interesting perspectives on topics that are rarely discussed at this serious a level.
I hope I didn’t scare anyone off with that. This isn’t an art book for the faint of heart, but is one that anyone in the business of media art, as well as art historians and curators, should definitely take a look at. I can almost guarantee you’ll get a new perspective (or two, or over a dozen) on digital art forms, their history, and their future.
