Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics

by Anna Munster

A significant contribution to investigations of the social and cultural impact of new media and digital technologies

In Materializing New Media, Anna Munster offers an alternative aesthetic genealogy for digital culture. Eschewing the prevailing Cartesian aesthetic that aligns the digital with the disembodied, the formless, and the placeless, Munster seeks to “materialize” digital culture by demonstrating that its aesthetics have reconfigured bodily experience and reconceived materiality.

Her topics range from artistic experiments in body-computer interfaces to the impact that corporeal interaction and geopolitical circumstances have on producing new media art and culture. She argues that new media, materiality, perception, and artistic practices now mutually constitute “information aesthetics.” Information aesthetics is concerned with new modes of sensory engagement in which distributed spaces and temporal variation play crucial roles. In analyzing the experiments that new media art performs with the materiality of space and time, Munster demonstrates how new media has likewise changed our bodies and those of others in global information culture.

Materializing New Media calls for a re-examination of the roles of both body and affect in their relation to the virtual and to abstract codes of information. It offers a nonlinear approach to aesthetics and art history based on a concept of “folding” that can discern certain kinds of proximities and continuations across distances in time (in particular between the Baroque and the digital). Finally, it analyzes digital culture through a logic of the differential rather than of the binary. This allows the author to overcome a habit of futurism, which until now has plagued analyses of new media art and culture. Technology is now not seen as surpassing the human body but continually reconfiguring it and constitutive of it.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2006

About the author

Anna Munster is Associate Professor and a Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Experimental Art at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics.

Reviews

[Aimée]

Munster’s project involves the argument that: “information aesthetics is capable of offering us both a critical commentary that folds back upon the broader flows of a more reductive information culture and a new kind of aesthetics that unfolds into new sensory spaces for lived experience” (Munster 2006: 38). It is this “new aesthetics” that I am particularly interested in, which she discusses in the last chapters of the book. This is important because it is going to help me move beyond the visual and toward a theory of embodied aesthetic engagement with new media. Munster discusses many accounts of new media art (should I conduct close readings of new media art as well, while employing my model for aesthetic engagement?) Munster writes “These kinds of new media artworks neither promise a direct relation to the sensorium rendered by informatic visualization nor bypass the body altogether. Rather they suggest that any future for embodiment in the landscape of information must leave space for the aesthetic processes of composition. This is not a space marked by a controlling, organizing subject or cogito who looks back at its body from the outside or a technology that adopts a similar position of knowingly representing the body. This space is instead inflected by the shadow and absence of the self, as the bodily silhouettes of participants are projected onto the topology of biological visualization. This shadowy figure is the mark of the death of the subject as knowable, manageable or reducible to a recognizable pattern of information.” (145).

Munster offers her thoughts in several places, regarding what a new aesthetics can do:

“These experiences of crossing thresholds between here and there, continuous and differentiated, corporeal and incorporeal, are common facets of engaging with virtual and telepresent technologies and environments. Thought about the body and actual sensory participation and engagement must be re-engaged in our analysis of digital culture in order to assist with this kind of threshold experience” (9).

“But if we recast the digital as an aesthetic force capable of producing new kinds of sensations and affective responses, we might instead see it as belonging to the activity of imagining” (94).

“Information aesthetics now needs to invent an affectivity for its culture from the sensations and perceptions that its technologies produce.” (116).

[micha cardenas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of the best books I found when looking for material for my MFA. Anna Munster skillfully analyzes new media, using Deleuze's notion of the fold as a way out of the mind/body duality that often dominates debates about synthetic/virtual worlds, virtual reality and information technologies. She discusses, across different chapters, digitality, virtuality, 18th century natural science, interfaces and baroque aesthetics.

Incredibly well written and interesting, Munster's book looks at various new media projects as examples for the concepts she discusses. She also brings to her analysis a critical feminist inclination that I appreciate, resisting the tendency to vacate the body and social concerns associated with it.

The book also brings together a lot of theorists who's work I find fascinating: Brian Massumi, Katherine Hayles, Sandy Stone, Feilx Guattari, and more!

[Steen Ledet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book on digital embodiment but often takes the long way round.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wunderkammer!

[Liz]

Didn't read all of this book--not even close. But what I did read was good.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

ugh I kind of hated this book. it choked on rhetoric.