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In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counter hype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This book aims to demonstrate how such critical work can be done. This book offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, the book deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. The book combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.

Distant Wars Visible brings a new perspective to the enduring question about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the twenty-first century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in the United States’ militaristic pursuit of its national security objectives as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative and radical visual projects to understand how representations of U.S. militarism navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, I argue, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility. In the past several years, important new studies have been published about human rights, militarism and visual cultures. In conversation with these texts, this book’s interdisciplinary critical feminist approach consider how factors like gender, race and sexuality construct often competing visualizations of identity in a range of media from graphic narrative and film to conflict photography and battlefield souvenirs. The analytic of ambivalence offers a critical methodological approach that examines how contingencies and contradictions in visual culture shape the politics and ethics of witnessing. Distant Wars Visible’s main objective is to gain further insights into how the ethical imperative that motivates the desire to look at human insecurities in times of warfare is intimately bound up in the politics of recognition.

Since its inception in the 1960s, the earth art movement has sought to make visible the elusive presence of nature. Though most often associated with monumental land-based sculptures, earth art encompasses a wide range of media, from sculpture, body art performances, and installations to photographic interventions, public protest art, and community projects. This book analyzes the development of the earth art movement, arguing that such diverse artists as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland, and Ichi Ikeda are connected through their elucidation of the earth as a domain of ethical concern. The book contends that in basing their works’ relationship to the natural world on receptivity rather than representation, earth artists take an ethical stance that counters both the instrumental view that seeks to master nature and the Romantic view that posits a return to a mythical state of unencumbered continuity with nature. By incorporating receptive surfaces into their work—film footage of glaring sunlight, an aperture in a chamber that opens to the sky, or a porous armature on which vegetation grows—earth artists articulate the dilemma of representation that nature presents.

Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and appropriation have become dominant aesthetic practices. But critical methods have not kept pace with this development. This book reopens the debate about quotation and appropriation, shifting away from naïve claims about the death of the author. In interpretations of art and literature from the 1960s to the present, this book shows how artists and writers use quotation not to undermine authorship and originality, but to answer questions at the heart of twentieth-century philosophies of history. The book argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, it offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.

What is it like to be an animal? This book aims to find out from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, it bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other—or any other. Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, the book argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists. Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human-animal engagement, the book considers artists—including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates—who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.