Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 98 Edward A. Shanken
Art and Electronic Media
London: Thames and Hudson, Themes & Movements series, 2009 (Hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-0714847825
Jan Baetens
Edward A. Shanken’s new book is an important publication. A well-written, excellently documented and researched, clearly structured and wonderfully illustrated overview of the encounter of art and new media since (mainly) the 1920s, Art and Electronic Media will prove very rapidly to be a major reference in the field. The book has a perfect balance between encyclopaedic information (much needed despite –or because of– the overwhelming amount of data that is now available on this subject) and properly scholarly ambitions (which can only be welcomed in a field that is very sensitive to hypes and name-dropping). Shanken provides the reader with a clear guide, user-friendly and perfectly adapted to the needs of many course offerings, as well as a sound attempt to introduce something like a canon, at least for the geographical areas that are covered, which are mainly Anglo-Saxon and without the dangerous ambition to offer too narrow a canon.
According to the general editorial principles of the series, the book is organized in three sections. It starts with a historic overview of the topic. Such an enterprise may seem simple, if not elementary, but the very complexity of the field makes it a great challenge, and the result deserves all our admiration. One can of course discuss the limits, or lack of limits of the corpus, but this objection does not hold very long. After all, since the industrial revolution and the gradual spread of technology in the social sphere, all new technology has been appropriated by artists and it is not absurd to claim that the role of art has become exactly that: the redefinition of our technological environment, the critical reflection on new tools, the meaning of our relationship with our environment. Shanken’s very inclusive view of art makes that point very clear, and that is a good thing. The central part of the book is an extensive illustration of the major artistic achievements in each of the seven fields that also organize the historical survey: 1) Motion, Duration, Illumination; 2) Coded Form and Electronic Production; 3) Charged Environments; 4) Networks, Surveillance, Culture Jamming; 5) Bodies, Surrogates, Emergent Systems; 6) Simulations and Simulacra; and 7) Exhibitions, Institutions, Communities, Collaborations. Here, too, it is certainly possible to discuss the concrete mapping and charting of the field, but this is a detail in comparison with the fact that the author manages to propose an overall structure which enables him to present the essential works and features of the field, while allowing scholarly innovation as well. In this regard, the last section on the institutional framing of new media art is particularly illuminating and welcome (I was glad to see the role of Leonardo acknowledged and recognized in very clear terms). Finally, a third section gathers a broad section of seminal texts on various aspects of art and new media issues. This anthology does not only bring together a set of fascinating essays and speculations (for many authors working in the field do escape the rules of the traditional essay, such as Roy Ascott for instance, whose tremendously important work is given its due by Shanken), it also makes a certain number of texts accessible that are either out of print or very difficult to find (even on the Internet) in a very structured and coherent way.
Image & Narrative, Vol 10, No 3 (2009) 99 Two small critical footnotes, which are more regrets than criticisms, concern on the one hand the excessive emphasis on Anglo-Saxon culture (yes, I regret that Chris Marker is not mentioned in this book) and on the other hand the often implicitly accepted or maintained assumption that new media have a specific locus, albeit a very shattered one: the museum, the gallery, the performance place, the public space (although this is of course correct to a very large extent, it may prevent the critic and the scholar from contesting the boundaries between visual culture and other types of culture, such as writing). In the best of all possible worlds, the publisher would invite Edward A. Shanken and N. Katherine Hayles, the author of Electronic Literature (Notre Dame University Press, 2008) or Joseph Tabbi, the editor of electronic book review, a major site on critical thinking on new media culture (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/), to write a book together not just on new media and art or new media and writing but on new media culture. Finally, I can imagine that some of the texts gathered in the third section of the book may remain very opaque, less in what they say than in what they may mean (I am thinking for instance on some lines by Artaud or the fragment on Oulipo, where a more direct editorial accompaniment might have been useful). But as I said, these are just footnotes. What matters is the global accomplishment of the book, which one can only hope to find very soon on the shelves, on the table, in the hands of all those interested in new media art –and in culture in general.
Jan Baetens is chief editor of Image (&) narrative Email: jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
