Recent innovations in access to technology have led to an explosion in the number and variety of interactive art installations. Art pieces that would have been inconceivable twenty years ago are now popping up in galleries and public spaces around the world, expanding the range of human experience in mind-boggling ways. New Media Installation offers a fascinating look into the world of technology-based art installations, with a global selection of artists and works. Interactive installations respond to the viewer's voice, touch and proximity, while non-interactive pieces create otherworldly objects and environments for viewers to explore from all angles. Gorgeous photographs capture the size and scale of more than ninety installation pieces that combine light, motion, space and code to create singular experiences.

The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

Media screens--film, video, and computer screens--have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. Screens addresses this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, Kate Mondloch traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today's digital culture. Mondloch identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject's field of vision. As a result she proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.

Offers an overview of the transformative nature of installation art over the past decade, including coverage of the work of Doug Aitken, Kazuo Katase, Hans Haacke, Christian Boltanksi, Damien Hirst, Vanessa Beecroft, Gary Hill, Mariko Mori, and Bill Viola

Multi-media charts the development of multi-media video, installation and performance in a unique dialogue between theoretical analysis and specially commissioned documentations by some of the world’s foremost artists. Nick Kaye explores the interdisciplinary history and character of experimental practices shaped in exchanges between music, installation, theatre, performance art, conceptual art, sculpture and video. The book sets out key themes and concerns in multi-media practice, addressing time, space, the resurgence of ephemerality, liveness and ‘aura’. These chapters are interspersed with documentary artwork and essays by artists whose work continues to shape the field, including new articles from: Vito Acconci The Builders Association John Jesurun Pipilotti Rist Fiona Templeton. Multi-media also reintroduces a major documentary essay by Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro in a new, fully illustrated form. This book combines sophisticated scholarly analysis and fascinating original work to present a refreshing and creative investigation of current multi-media arts practice.

This title takes an informative and compelling look at the future of new media based on the experience of one of the world's leading agencies in this area.