Digital Creativity:
A Reader
Edited by
Colin Beardon and Lone Malmborg Sweets and
Zeitlinger
Lisse, Amsterdam, 2002 ISBN 90-265-1939-7
http://www.szp.swets.nl
and
Digital Media Revisited
Edited by Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison,
and Terje Rasmussen
Cambridge, MA; MIT Press. 2003, $42.95 cloth
ISBN 0-262-12256-1
http://mitpress.mit.edu
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
<mosher@svsu.edu>, Saginaw Valley
State University, University Center MI USA
48710
This reviewer had wondered what had happened
to the wide-ranging and optimistic creativity
of the Cyberpunk era, the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Artists were making creative
use of poetic hypertexts, Hypercard stacks
and CD-ROMs. Virtual Reality, however
creaky its visuals and screen refresh time,
was the greatest thing since psychedelic
ergot on bread (pay no attention to the
multiple workstations behind the curtain)!
Everybody read of bleeding-edge technology,
realized or lushly theorized, in Mondo
2000 and Boing Boing magazines.
The recession that distinguished the first
George Bush's U.S. presidency put a stop
to it, and attention soon turned to building
the components--usually commercial--of the
World Wide Web.
Many artists evidently kept the fires of
creativity burning by publishing in the
journal Digital Creativity, which
sprang from the Computers in Art and Design
Education (CADE) conference in Brighton,
England in 1995. Colin Beardon of
Great Britain and Lone Malmborg of Sweden
have edited a reader from seven year’s
of the publication, and their book offers
an agreeable collection of digital artists
and their friends from around the world.
Carol Gigliotti asks "What is consciousness
for?" in her essay of that title, and Pierre
Levy of Canada welcomes us to today's virtuality.
It is useful to have at hand essays by Johanna
Drucker on the body and Char Davies on her
OSMOSE immersive virtual space. Pelle
Ehn calls for a "digital Bauhaus" teaching
digital craft and fomenting inspiration.
We are given a Polish view of virtual bodies,
a Malaysian view of augmentation by prosthetics,
a British view of digital agents, a Japanese
view on artificial life, a Brazilian view
of the "technological soul", a Swedish view
of the virtual self. Other essays
examine new works or tendencies of dance,
poetry, game aesthetics, "voice ghosts"
and performance, and essays on virtual architecture
by architects and scholars from France,
the U.S., Italy and Austria.
The anthology Digital Creativity
can be contrasted with the somewhat more
dour collection Digital Media Revisited.
This book lacks some of the excitement of
the Digital Creativity contributors'
primary discoveries and encounters with
the process of creating their own artistic
works. The authors collected in Digital
Media Revisited seek theoretical innovation
in new digital media, even where those theoretical
principles may not yet be readily apparent.
There are some useful and valuable contributions
to be found here. George P. Landow
ponders academic sites and their effects
upon literature and the arts in "The Paradigm
is More Important than the Purchase: Educational
Innovation and Hypertext Theory".
Anders Fagerjord's essay "Rhetorical Convergence"
analyzes online coverage by both CNN and
a Norwegian paper for their coverage of
grisly crime, and how the respective websites'
interfaces each shaped the greater story.
Lars Qvortrup ("Digital Art and Design Poetics")
cites the Oncotype art collective's installation
"Recoil", where words spoken into a microphone
design the specifics of the participant's
experience of the work's technology-enabled
environment.
Several essays in Digital Media Revisited
make good use of lessons from gameplay,
an arena of cyberspatial experience too
often ignored as a subject of serious study.
May a spirit of play and creative enthusiasm
leaven all our encounters with--and construction
of theories about--technology, for the contrary
only fosters market-driven shortsightedness,
overwork and drudgery. Many of us
still believe cyberspace remains too promising
to allow that.
* * *
