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 Pesce’s VRML, then Ted Nelson’s 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 book’s 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.