Digital Art and Meaning. Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counter-hype. Popular writing about specific art works seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate such examples. Digital Art and Meaning offers a series of close readings of varied examples from different genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, the book investigates the deeper meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; of images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; of a curtain of little screens compiling chunks of text from online conversations; of text-machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; of a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. The book combines these close readings with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole, making a crucial step toward bringing the digital arts into the traditions of art history and criticism as well as expanding those traditions to embrace the digital.