Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature
 
An audacious, interdisciplinary study that combines the burgeoning fields of digital aesthetics and eco-criticism
 
In Animal, Vegetable, Digital, Elizabeth Swanstrom makes a confident and spirited argument for the use of digital art in support of ameliorating human engagement with the environment and suggests a four-part framework for analyzing and discussing such applications.
 
Through close readings of a panoply of texts, artworks, and cultural artifacts, Swanstrom demonstrates that the division popular culture has for decades observed between nature and technology is artificial. Not only is digital technology not necessarily a brick in the road to a dystopian future of environmental disaster, but digital art forms can be a revivifying bridge that returns people to a more immediate relationship to nature as well as their own embodied selves.
 
To analyze and understand the intersection of digital art and nature, Animal, Vegetable, Digital explores four aesthetic techniques: coding, collapsing, corresponding, and conserving. “Coding” denotes the way artists use operational computer code to blur distinctions between the reader and text, and, hence, the world. Inviting a fluid conception of the boundary between human and technology, “collapsing” voids simplistic assumptions about the human body’s innate perimeter. The process of translation between natural and human-readable signs that enables communication is described as “corresponding.” “Conserving” is the application of digital art by artists to democratize large- and small-scale preservation efforts.
 
A fascinating synthesis of literary criticism, communications and journalism, science and technology, and rhetoric that draws on such disparate phenomena as simulated environments, video games, and popular culture, Animal, Vegetable, Digital posits that partnerships between digital aesthetics and environmental criticism are possible that reconnect humankind to nature and reaffirm its kinship with other living and nonliving things.
 

Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced research. Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, New Media Futures captures the spirit and contributions of twenty-two women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. The editors and contributors give voice as creators integral to the development of these new media and place their works at the forefront of social change and artistic inquiry. What emerges is the dramatic story of how these Midwestern explorations in the digital arts produced a web of fascinating relationships. These fruitful collaborations helped usher in the digital age that propelled social media. Contributors: Carolina Cruz-Niera, Colleen Bushell, Nan Goggin, Mary Rasmussen, Dana Plepys, Maxine Brown, Martyl Langsdorf, Joan Truckenbrod, Barbara Sykes, Abina Manning, Annette Barbier, Margaret Dolinsky, Tiffany Holmes, Claudia Hart, Brenda Laurel, Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder, Sally Rosenthal, Lucy Petrovic, Donna J. Cox, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron.
 

Seeing new media art as an entry point for better understanding of technology and worldmaking futures

In this challenging work, a leading authority on new media art examines that curatorial and aesthetic landscape to explore how art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. How do inventive combinations of artistic and theoretical improvisation counter the extent to which media art remains at risk, not just from the quarantines of a global pandemic but also from the very viral and material conditions of technology?  How does global media art speak back to the corporate closures of digital euphoria as clothed in strategies of digital surveillance, ecological deprivation, and planned obsolescence? In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray asks these questions and more. 

At the intersection of global media art, curatorial practice, tactical media, and philosophy, Murray reads a wide range of creative performances and critical texts that envelop artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. From video to net art and interactive performance, he considers both canonical and unheralded examples of activist technics that disturb the hegemony of biopolitical/digital networks by staging the very touch of the unsettling discourse erupting from within. In the process, critical dialogues emerge between a wide range of artists and theorists, from Hito Steyerl, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shadi Nazarian to Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jean-François Lyotard, Erin Manning, Achille Mbembe, and Samuel Weber.

Brilliantly conceived and argued and eloquently written, Technics Improvised points the way to how artistic and theoretical practice can seize on the improvisational accidents of technics to activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.