About
The texts in this site constitute detailed critiques of new media's intersection in art, literature, architecture.
Some of my recent publications include:
- Cyberculture and New Media
- Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism
08 Dec
05 Dec
Manifest and Latent Reflections on Art and Art Basel
I. Manifest As with so many other event cities that for a few days blossom into urban art constellations, it was time again to engage in that uncanny bit of ethnography called Art Basel Miami Beach. Upon my arrival, I sat to plan the agenda of this visit – like Proust, I actually expected that most [...]
13 Nov
Hedi Slimane, Cultural Barometer
Hedi Slimane’s “California Song” exhibit at LA MoCA marks another point in the coordinate system of legitimate cultural voices – barometers – that corroborate why the overlay of “popular” modes of expression – fashion, art, and music – is key for any comprehensive clarity of the “contemporary”.
16 Apr
Opening the Matrix of the Heart in James Franco’s “The Broken Tower”
Thoughts on a biopic of the poet Hart Crane, directed by and starring James Franco.
05 Dec
The Affective Index in Video’s Depiction of Desire
Integrating the polarities of high and low culture, the image in contemporary photography and video’s tensions between distance and intimacy that has been exercised through allusions to reminiscent longing for the Other.
09 Sep
Engagement II – Marclay’s Media Metonymy
In three simultaneous venues in New York City, Christian Marclay’s unconventional deconstruction of consumer media, principally the phonograph and photographic image, perfects fragmentary recollection by melding real with imagined memory.
24 Jul
The Engagement Aesthetic – An Introduction
A new form of perceptual process, perhaps interactive and embodied, but more than both or either, connects contemporary art to the art of digital media. The title of this post is the title of my upcoming book.
08 Jul
Emergent Form in the Post-Literary Mechanism, From Exposition to Reflexivity
The argument begun with an historical and critical overlay of form in relation to typography is extended to examples of conceptual re-formation of structure where the work reflects its own content.
05 May
Emergent Form in the Post-Literary Mechanism, an Historical Argument
An historical and critical overlay of form in relation to sculpture, typography, and the geometric insistence of printed page serves as a preamble for a subsequent analysis of the Readers Project.
15 Apr
The Aura of the Distributed Moment
Walter Benjamin’s auratic aesthetic implies norms of creation that no longer reflect the pluralistic structure of transmedia art.
05 Apr
Cyberculture’s Perpetual “Until Something Else”
Cyberculture, whatever definition may address its structural characteristics, behaves as a social network of successive obsolescences.
25 Mar
Spatial Engagement’s Chronotope in Electronic Art and the Public Sphere
The architectural interventions that have come to the public sphere are not merely physical or sculptural. As public art, electronic works possess a unique chronotope, or spatiotemporal character, in Bakhtin’s term.
22 Mar
Optimizing Metaprogramming
A historical gloss ranging from the free software movement to a philosophy of empirical engagement.
19 Mar
Formalisms of Digital Text
A quantitative and critical analysis of four distinct communicative modes – speech, blogs, emails, and printed text (as fiction works) to examine some empirical distinctions.
17 Mar
Transversing Shamanism, Turing, and ELIZA
Every so often, scholarship returns to the problem of human dialogic interaction with systems designed with capabilities for patterned response. What archetypes does intelligence mirror?
14 Mar
From Objecthood to Processhood
The myth of aesthetic claims that the art status of digitally mediated works is based on their material properties, rather than their processual ontology, is fraught with ideological distortion.
06 Feb
Participation, Mediated and Recursive
In the realm of digital performance where distinctions between game and ritual dissolve, notions of participation expand to reflect more open and virtualized theaters of activity.
22 Jan
Space and Structure in Post-Architecture
“Form follows Function”, the mantra of modern architecture, is rendered irrelevant to virtual worlds, where it is replaced by the language of space and structure.
19 Jan
From Object to Statement
Photography’s transition from documentary to aesthetic function, tracing a transition from object to image-making, is a reflexive turn for other prospective media art.
16 Jan
Category: Critique