Christopher Kelty

In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices. Communication and media scholars have increasingly taken theoretical perspectives originating in science and technology studies (STS), while some STS scholars interested in information technologies have linked their research to media studies inquiries into the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to advance this view of media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena. This text first addresses the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. It then highlights media technologies as always in motion, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive.

"In the creation of electronic and digital art, a research and development phase is almost always necessary. Research sometimes concentrates on the use of existing technologies in the content of the work, and at other times on the development of new technologies (hard-, soft- and netware) needed to realize the intended project. This research is notably interdisciplinary, linking visual and sound artists with engineers, programmers and designers as well as with scientists from diverse fields. The projects are often carried out in "art labs" which have been set up in the past fifteen years around the world especially for this purpose." "aRt&D: Artistic Research and Development lays open this new, investigative field of art by looking at a number of characteristic and thought-provoking projects. At the same time, it develops a theoretical framework for situating and evaluating this important new artistic practice."--BOOK JACKET.