Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow

by Victoria Vesna

Overview

Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.

Contributors: Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.

Victoria Vesna is a media artist, and professor and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816641192
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/22/2007
Series:	Electronic Mediations , #20
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.89(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Margot Lovejoy is professor emerita of visual arts at SUNY Purchase and the author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.

 

Christiane Paul is adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art.

 

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and professor in the Department of Design and Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She is also director of the UCLA Art|Sci center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction   Victoria Vesna     ix
Database Aesthetics
Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand: The Database Aesthetics of Everything   Victoria Vesna     3
Database as Symbolic Form   Lev Manovich     39
Ocean, Database, Recut   Grahame Weinbren     61
Waiting for the World to Explode: How Data Convert into a Novel   Norman M. Klein     86
The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives   Christiane Paul     95
The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0   Steve Dietz     110
Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics   Bill Seaman     121
The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity   Sharon Daniel     142
Network Aesthetics   Warren Sack     183
Game Engines as Embedded Systems   Robert F. Nideffer     211
Artists and Data Projects
Stock Market Skirt: The Evolution of the Internet, the Interface, and an Idea   Nancy Paterson     233
Pockets Full of Memories   George Legrady     243
The Raw Data Diet, All-Consuming Bodies, and the Shape of Things to Come   Lynn Hershman-Leeson     249
Time Capsule:Networking the Biological [Biotech and Trauma]   Eduardo Kac     253
Aesthetics of ecosystm   John Klima     260
Polar   Marko Peljhan     269
Publication History     279
Contributors     281
Index     285