Shifting Interfaces

Up-to-date account of media art issues in the early 21st century

Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on the field, with a considerable representation of art-based research gaining salience in media art studies. The collection attends to art projects interrogating the destabilisation of identity and the breaching of individual privacy, the rekindled interest in phenomenology and in the neurocognitive workings of empathy, and the routes of interconnectivity beyond the human in the age of the Internet of Things. Offering a diversity of perspectives, ranging from purely theoretical to art-based research, and from aesthetics to social and cultural critique, this volume will be of great value for readers interested in contemporary art, art-science-technology interfaces, visual culture, and cultural studies.

Contributors: Hava Aldouby (The Open University of Israel), Grant Bollmer (North Carolina State University / University of Sydney), Andrea Pinotti (University of Milan), Daniel H. Landau (Aalto University / Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya), Wendy Jo Coones (Danube University Krems), Paul Sermon (University of Brighton), Ryszard Kluszczynski (University of Lodz), Derek Curry (Northeastern University, Boston), Jennifer Gradecki (SUNY Buffalo / Northeastern University, Boston), Tsila Hassine (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design / Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne), Ziv Neeman (independent scholar), Manuela Naveau (Ars Electronica, Linz), Aaron Burton (University of Wollongong), Yvonne Volkart (Academy of Art and Design, FHNW Basel), Jens Hauser (IKK & Medical Museion, Copenhagen University), Adam Brown (Michigan State University), Jonas Jørgensen (IT University of Copenhagen), Olga Kisseleva (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Introduction: Shift­ing Interfaces
Hava Aldouby

I Immersion, Empathy, and Presence: Manipulating the Boundaries of Self and Body

From Immersion to Empathy: The Legacy of Einfühlung in Virtual Reality and Digital Art
Grant Bollmer

Avatars: Shi­fting Identities in a Genealogical Perspective
Andrea Pinotti

Meeting Yourself in Virtual Reality: A Performative Experiment in Self-Compassion
Daniel Landau

Art and Presence: Investigating Embodiment in a Virtual Art Gallery
Hava Aldouby

Shared Objective Empathy in Telematic Space
Paul Sermon

Elaborating Mediation Through Media Arts
Wendy Coones

II Subjects of Surveillance: Reclaiming Human Agency in the Big Data Universe

Qualculative Poetics: An Artistic Critique of Rational Judgment
Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki

Google, Shmoogle: A Critical Twist on Search Engine Ideology
Ziv Neeman and Tsila Hassine

Sculpting Time: The Art of Collective Memory
Ryszard W. Kluszczynski

The Logic of Participation in Digital Art and Network Culture
Manuela Naveau

Aesthetic Strategies in the Wasteocene
Yvonne Volkart

III Bacteria and Smart Objects: Presences Beyond the Human

Rehabilitating Bacteria: An Epistemological Art/Science Interface
Jens Hauser

Exceptional Matters
Adam W. Brown

From So­ Sculpture to So­ Robotics: Retracing Entropic Aesthetics of the Life-like
Jonas Jørgensen

Natures Mortes, Live Data: The Art Object in the IoT Era
Tsila Hassine, Olga Kisseleva

Unmanned Imaging of the Anthropocene
Aaron Burton

List of Contributors

Index

Color Plates

Hava Aldouby

Hava Aldouby is senior lecturer in Art History at the Open University of Israel, Department of Language, Literature, and the Arts, and artistic director of the Open University Gallery.