BOOK
The Gist: A Survey Of Tech Aesthetics
$49.95
Stephen Wilson, a professor of conceptual and information arts at San Francisco State University, has taken on the tremendous task of writing an exhaustive survey of contemporary artists who riff off the worlds of science, math, and technology - sometimes with humor, other times with ominous concern. In more than 900 pages, he presents an admirable compendium of work, the majority of which was created within the past seven years.
The book's roster reads like a who's who of international scenemakers. Included are Japan's Kenji Yanobe, creator of apocalyptic "survival suits"; Austria's Christa Sommerer and France's Laurent Mignonneau, developers of virtual creatures with random email-text DNA; and the US's Ken Goldberg, designer of a Net-controlled gardening robot.
Wilson deftly juxtaposes earnest summaries of emerging research in fields such as medicine and telecommunications with 279 complementary images to point out the blurred boundaries between science and art. Take, for example, the nerdy quiz he dreamed up. The reader is presented with several projects and must guess whether an artist or a scientist created them. The list includes a fertility bra that uses pheromone receptors to determine ovulation, and a mice-breeding experiment in which some of the rodents are found to prefer computer cables to food. As it turns out, the bra was developed in a science lab, the experiment in an artist's studio. Then there's a computer graphic as beautiful as an abstract painting that was created by mathematical biologists to simulate the structure of a virus, and a Michael Rees sculpture that resembles a biology-lab model of a mutant human spine.
Wilson places the art in context with modern times, but he doesn't reject history. Nearly every chapter begins with some attempt to link today's information artists with those of the past. He points out that creative types have long been fascinated by natural and technological phenomena, and uses the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux - which can also be seen as early scientific documents of wildlife - as a prime example. Sure, the book's goal is to hype a fresh breed of artists. But understanding their work in the long tradition of experimentation with new tools and brave ideas gives their projects more weight.
MIT Press: www.mitpress.mit.edu.
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