About the book:
Net Works offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. In many practice-based art texts and classrooms, technology is divorced from the socio-political concerns of those using it. Although there are many resources for media theorists, practice-based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. Net Works strives to fill that gap.
Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project–from formalist play to social activism to data visualization–and then includes the artists’ or entrepreneurs’ reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Scholarly introductions to each section apply a theoretical frame for the projects. Beyond project summaries, chapters also include an explanation of the websites’ technological components; historical, cultural, and ethical perspectives; a list of links; key words and short online exercises that relate technical skills to individual projects. Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, Net Works is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.
About the speakers:
Xtine Borrough is a media artist, educator, editor of Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (Routledge 2011) and co-author of Digital Foundations (New Riders/AIGA 2009). Informed by the history of conceptual art, she uses social networking, databases, search engines, blogs, and applications in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk, to create web communities promoting interpretation and autonomy.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor at Parsons MFA in Design & Technology. He has held a Research Fellow positions at Media Lab Europe and Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks” which includes over 77 projects that attempt to critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.
Jeremy Rotsztain is a Canadian digital artist who, taking cues from the practice of painting, works with movies, images, and sound as a kind of malleable and expressive material. In his work, popular narratives, pixels, and sound bites are sampled, transformed, re-arranged and composed in an effort to examine the language and patterns of contemporary media and the shared cultural experiences that we have with them. Jeremy writes custom software, enabling him to collect, edit, and compose with his materials in hybrid and unconventional ways that aren’t supported by existing commercial software applications.