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Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts, Volume V (XIV)
Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties

Published by The Scientific Society in Lodz
Lodz, Poland 2003
ISSN 0459-8954
Society’s website: http://
www.ltn.lodz.pl

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

The Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties issue of Art Inquiry is valuable for giving voice to artist-academics in Poland, binding their reports and theories alongside those of similar minds in the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere. The reader learns of work done in Cracow, Lodz and Poznan, in analyses of software art effects on seeing and perception, on VR and cinema, and interactive installations. Machiko Kusahara provides a useful overview of Japanese visual entertainments from the earliest Nintendo games to diversions available on the NTT mobile phone. Sean Cubitt is optimistic about "media democracy", while Geoff Cox and Jessica Krysa cite Walter Benjamin to locate the work of recent critical techno-art collectives into older and broader currents of cultural history.

Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties is bookended with essays by Roy Ascott and by Eduardo Kac. Ascott writes of our post-biological age and what that implies for the arts. Ascott is a grand old man in the field that Stephen Wilson called "Information Arts", having articulated telematics theory decades ago that still informs digital work today. As a visionary educator as well as an artist-theorist, Ascott has designed and assembled the doctoral program at University of Plymouth (UK), attracting a significant group of faculty and fellows that endeavor to establish an Internet-enabled "Planetary Collegium" linking sibling institutions. Kac's work demonstrates how biology can be manipulated for benign aesthetic purposes, among many others. Kac has explored biological processes (in a Freudian slip, this reviewer almost typed "prophecies"), to degrade a scriptural text on the relation between human and animal realms, and to create a cleverly gene-spliced phosphorescent rabbit that glows an eerie green.

It is good to see such a collection of essays published in Eastern Europe as its nations integrate into the European Union. May this rich issue of Art Inquiry fertilize and inspire further creative inquiries, there and everywhere.

 

 




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