Digital culture.

DIGITAL ART (World of Art) by CHRISTIANE PAUL

Thames & Hudson 224pp./$14.95 (sb)

DIGITAL CULTURE by CHARLIE GERE 

Reaktion Books 22pp./$25 (sb)

Through the decade of the nineteen nineties, it was difficult to find a basic introduction to digital culture, let alone to digital art. Several early anthologies attempted to map the field from different vantage points. Despite their purported focus on the digital, many of the books written by a single author focused on pre-digital media. Manovich's The Language of New Media (2000) was the most erudite and comprehensive text, yet limited as an introduction to digital art by the scarcity of illustrations, and lacking as an introduction to digital culture by its treatment of digital media in isolation from social issues. The anthologies explored multiple topics in digital culture, interactivity, embodiment, surveillance, community, subjectivity agency, and gender. They often lacked historicity. Thus they were more helpful to the informed reader than to the beginner. Two books recently published contribute to fill that gap.

Digital Culture by British scholar Charlie Gere is concise and ambitious in its interdisciplinary approach. Gere argues that digital culture is neither new nor determined by technology, but rather that technology is a product of digital culture. According to Gere, the term "digital" originally referred to data organized in discreet units in any system, linguistic, and numerical systems included. The term became synonymous with digital binary computer systems only recently. In the first two chapters of Digital Culture Gere summarizes technical, theoretical and cultural phenomena that lead to the development of the digital computer. He examines this history in the context of the growth of capitalism arguing that the abstraction of materials and processes and the standardization of signs facilitate the flow of goods, money and people. Gere views the typewriter, the telegraph, the telephone, photography and the computer as all indispensable to the expansion of capitalism because they facilitated the dematerialization and circulation of signs. Gere pays as much attention to theoretical discourses directly or indirectly related to the history of computers as to historical documentation of the technology. He proposes that Boole's symbolic logic and Leibniz's work on language prefigured the development of computers, and complemented capitalism's imperative towards abstraction.

War figures large in Gere's account as the urgencies of international confrontations accelerated computer development. The necessity for encryption and decryption of communications during World War II, for example, prompted the invention of mechanical and electronic devices and resulted in the first digital computer. After the war, federal defense programs continued to drive much of computer research. In the meantime, artists investigated concepts related to information and communication technologies. In this group Gere mentions John Cage, the members of Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, various performance, kinetic, mail and cybernetic artists including David Medalla, Hans Haake, Roy Ascott and Nicholas Schoffer. Through the 1960s both conceptual and cybernetic artists were featured in the same shows. For Gere, the exhibition Conceptual Art, curated by Kynaston McShine at MOMA in 1970, marked the rupture between cybernetics and conceptual art as it included no cybernetic artists. Technologically-concerned art became marginal. Gere then argues that in the 1990s computer art re-emerged due, in part, to two events: the development of the micro-electronic industry and the emergence of a new counterculture near the centers of computer development in the United States. This counter culture expressed itself through such events as The Whole Earth Catalog, or later the birth of the Apple computer. Without establishing a causal relation, Gere identifies commonalities between Thatcher's and Reagan's neoliberalisms and the new counterculture: they all exalted individualism, scorned organizations and bureaucracies, and believed in the positive powers of information and communication technologies. Gere mentions citations of neoliberal economist Milton Freedman that could be found in the economics section of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The vast territory covered in Gere's book illustrates the fact that the study of digital culture cannot operate under a single discipline. It necessitates a multiplicity of analytic tools. As any introductory text, Digital Culture often leaves the reader wanting to know more. Gere mentions popular opposition to the Vietnam War in the context of military-funded research in American Universities during the 1970s and 80s but he fails to evaluate the effects of anti-war activism on the art world. An exploration of these relationships may have helped the reader to better understand the marginalization of technology in the art world after 1970.

Digital Art by Whitney Museum curator Christiane Paul, compensates for the limited attention to art in Gere's volume. After an introduction in which Paul sketches the development of both digital imaging technologies and digital art, she develops her three-point argument: "Digital Technologies as a Tool", "Digital Technologies as a Medium", and "Themes in Digital Art." Paul's differentiation of computer as tool from computer as medium is indebted to Manovich's definition of new media in The Language of New Media. The survey-style descriptions and the numerous color illustrations in the book differentiate Paul's approach from both Manovich's and Gere's. In the first chapter of Digital Art. Paul examines artists' use of computer technology in order to recreate traditional art forms such as prints, paintings and sculptures. Most useful for the novice are the last two chapters in which Paul discusses and illustrates the distinguishing features of the medium as well as its rich experimental possibilities. According to Paul, the digital medium is "interactive, participatory, dynamic, and customizable." In her mind "digitality" goes beyond a purely mental event, and can mean "navigating, assembling or contributing to a work of art."

In the third and last chapter of her book, Paul explores the themes of artificial life, artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, telepresence, telematics, telerobotics, body and identity, databases, data visualization, mapping, text and narrative environments, gaming, tactical media, activism and hack-activism.

An illustrated survey of digital art for undergraduates rather than a theoretical or socially-concerned treatise, Paul's book surveys the complexity of artistic production under the great umbrella of digitality. Read together, Digital Culture and Digital Art will offer readers a competent if still incomplete introduction to digital art and its technical, and socio-historical contexts.

MARIA FERNANDEZ is a professor of at Cornell University