Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art

New media art is explored as a gateway to understanding technology and worldmaking futures in this book, which investigates how art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. It looks at how creative performances and critical texts envelop artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. Critical dialogues emerge between artists and theorists, suggesting how artistic and theoretical practice can activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 19 February 2022
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

In this thought-provoking exploration, a renowned expert on new media art delves into the curatorial and aesthetic landscape to investigate how art challenges and reimagines the political and economic frameworks that shape technology. How can innovative blends of artistic and theoretical improvisation counteract the extent to which media art remains vulnerable, not only to the confinements of a global pandemic but also to the viral and material conditions of technology? How does global media art respond to the corporate closures of digital euphoria, disguised as strategies of digital surveillance, ecological deprivation, and planned obsolescence?

In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray poses these profound questions and many more. At the crossroads of global media art, curatorial practice, tactical media, and philosophy, Murray examines a diverse array of creative performances and critical texts that entangle artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. From video to net art and interactive performance, he explores both canonical and lesser-known examples of activist technics that disrupt the dominance of biopolitical/digital networks by staging the very touch of the unsettling discourse that erupts from within.

In the process, critical dialogues emerge between a wide range of artists and theorists, including Hito Steyerl, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shadi Nazarian. They are joined by renowned figures such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jean-François Lyotard, Erin Manning, Achille Mbembe, and Samuel Weber.

Brilliantly conceived, meticulously argued, and eloquently written, Technics Improvised serves as a guiding light toward how artistic and theoretical practices can shape our understanding of technology and the future of worldmaking. It encourages us to reimagine the boundaries between art and technology, and to explore new avenues for artistic and intellectual exploration in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Dimension: 216 x 140 x 38 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517912871