Snap to Grid: A User s Guide
to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures
Peter Lunenfeld
2001, MIT Press, Cambridge MA
http://mitpress.mit.edu
$18.95 paper, 226 pages, 83 illustrations
ISBN 0-262-62158-4
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>,
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.
It must have seemed like a good idea at
the time. The author or publisher had an idea to package several meditations
on new digital technologies together with several traditional reviews
of filmmakers and artists, and then claim it serves as a User
s Guide . To call it this does a disservice to the lightness
of touch in Peter Lunenfeld s best discussion of issues in the
technologies, and then to the gravity of his methodical old-school
criticism of several artists.
The book introduces a variety of contemporary technocultural grids,
then cites the importance of the demo as an artform and
communications trope To demonstrate an engineering feat or working
proof-of-concept now shapes, Lunenfeld believes, the role of the digital
fine artist. This is the tradition of human interface scientist Douglas
Engelbart demo-ing to assembled peers at Xerox PARC, or his heirs
at this year s SIGGRAPH conference or trade show. In it, Lunenfeld
locates the artist Stelarc, with his attached mechanical (third) arm
and plans for other bioapparatuses.
In subsequent chapters Lunenfeld discusses the cyberpunk of William
Gibson, Blade Runner dystopia vs. the promise of Mark
Pesces VRML, then Ted Nelsons Hypertext vision as interpreted
by authors Stuart Moulthrop, Mark Amerika and in commercial CD-ROMs.
Lunenfeld gives us critical apparatus and name-checking of philosophers
to approach digital photography and the issues of veracity it raises.
His discussion of the World Wide Web and virtual reality artwork of
Char Davies is followed by a dally in Joe Sparks memorably-visualized
teledildonic hoax in the short-lived FUTURE SEX erotic magazine a
decade ago. The final essay in this section concerns hybrid architectures,
which Lunenfeld find best realized in the small scale of the 1993
Electronic Mirror by Christian Möller which gradually
turns opaque as a viewer moves towards it for a better self-view.
These meditations and citations (of most of the usual cyber-suspects)
are followed by the Makers , some fairly unpredictible
choices. Here Lunenfeld s appreciations of Hollis Frampton s
movies of the 1970s and computer-powered gallery installations by
Jenifer Steinkamp and Diana Thater read like reviews in the back of
Art in America, and some did appear in the journals Afterimage
and art/text. These essays are sometimes very enjoyable,
sometimes insightful, but at other moments you wonder why Lunenfeld
is telling us this information in this books context, as if
these essays are left over from a much older book project. In the
single essay where he discusses Perry Hoberman s environmental
use of 16mm and 8mm film projectors, Gary Hill s photography
and Adam Ross abstrac paintings, there is more enthusiasm here than
a logical argument that links these disparate artists.
Snap to Grid is a command in digital graphics applications
like Photoshop to plot mousehand-drawn lines, with all their wobbles
and hesitations, into a Cartesian space. Though this book has an Appendix
of terms that readers new to the technological subjects discussed
may find useful, in this book snap to grid seems more
like a conceit to snap a vagabond collection of one critic s
work between covers.