16 Aug 2012

Imagery in the 21st Century

Subject: Imagery in the 21st Century, MIT Press - Reviews

Imagery in the 21st Century, edited by Oliver GRAU with Thomas VEIGL
MIT-Press, Cambridge/Mass, 2011.
English, 424 pages, 132 coloured and b/w illustrations, hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01572-1

With contributions by Marie-Luise ANGERER, Olaf BREIDBACH, Adrian David CHEOK, Wendy CHUN, Sean CUBITT, James ELKINS, Oliver GRAU, Stefan HEIDENREICH, Eduardo KAC, Martin KEMP, Harald KRAEMER, Lev MANOVICH & Jeremy DOUGLASS, Tim Otto ROTH & Andreas DEUTSCH, Martin SCHULZ, Christa SOMMERER & Laurent MIGNONNEAU, David & Dolores STEINMAN, Thomas VEIGL, Martin WARNKE and Peter WEIBEL.


REVIEWS

'Internationally renowned contributors from the arts, science & humanities examine this latest 'revolution of the image' and its implications for our contemporary globalized media society ...
thus a highly recommended read to discover individually.'
Pamela C. SCORZIN, JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY

'I was thrilled to read Grau's and Veigl's Imagery in the 21st Century and I will use it in my teaching. Imagery in the 21st Century is a fabulous resource for the reflection on contemporary visuality' Trebor SCHOLZ, NEW SCHOOL NY, ARTHIST

'The authors systematically make comprehensible the challenges of visuality in the 21st century, and for the detailed analysis of concrete problems apply new tools and analysis forms in image science and digital humanities. A wonderful book to begin; a new thinking in conjunction with the new visuality in the 21st century.'
Mikhail STEPANOV, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURE RESEARCH

'The editors demonstrate the importance to recontextualise the latest images with historic art and a poetic need of reinterpreting old optical media for a better understanding and redefinition of the image in its historic dimension.' Cleomar ROCHA a.o., VISUALIDADES, Brasil

'Even though we have just stepped into the 21st century, the texts in the book are (...) indispensable reading for the development of visual and media literacy essential for communication and social interaction in a dominantly visual world we live in.'
Jelena GUGA, NOVA MISAO, Serbia

'The analphabets of the future will not be those, who cannot read, but those who don't know how to see and understand visually. The anthology Imagery by Oliver Grau has seen and understood this prophetic writing on the wall by Walter Benjamin.'
Bent FAUSING, MEDIACULTURE


We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual.

Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time.

The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art.
They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.

Oliver Grau is Chair Professor for Image Science at Danube University. He is the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003) and editor of MediaArtHistories (2007), both published by the MIT Press. Thomas Veigl is on the scientific staff of the Center for Image Science at Danube University.

For more information:
www.donau-uni.ac.at/bild
mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12675
www.amazon.com/Imagery-21st-Century-Oliver-Grau/dp/0262015722/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314018124&sr=8-1