High-Tech Trash

High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.  “Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties  “Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture  “An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship  CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code

Computational expressionism : a study of drawing with computation

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-73).This thesis presents computational expressionism, an exploration of drawing using a computer that redefines the concepts of line and composition for the digital medium. It examines the artistic process involved in computational drawing, addressing the issues of skill, algorithmic style, authorship, re-appropriation, interactivity, dynamism, and the creative/evaluative process. The computational line augments the traditional concept of line making as a direct deposit or a scratching on a surface. Digital representation is based on computation; appearance is procedurally determined. The computational line embodies not only an algorithmic construction, but also dynamic and interactive behavior. A computer allows us to construct drawing instruments that take advantage of the dynamism, interactivity, behavioral elements and other features of a programming environment. Drawing becomes a two-fold process, at two distinct levels of interaction with the computer. The artist has to program the appearance and behavior of lines and subsequently draw with these lines by dragging a mouse or gesturing with some other input device. The compositions incorporate the beauty of computation with the creative impetus of the hand, whose apparent mistakes, hesitations and inspirations form a complex and critical component of visual expression.by Joanna Maria Berzowska.S.M

Immersion Into Noise

Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying our audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectual and cognative domains. The author takes the reader through phenomenal aspects of the art of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux