Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art - 9780262019323

Since the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator havereceived extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present achallenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aestheticexperience enabled by these new media works can open up new perspectives for our understanding ofart and media alike. Kwastek, herself an art historian, offers a set of theoretical andmethodological tools that are suitable for understanding and analyzing not only new media art butalso other contemporary art forms. Addressing both the theoretician and the practitioner, Kwastekprovides an introduction to the history and the terminology of interactive art, a theory of theaesthetics of interaction, and exemplary case studies of interactive mediaart.

Kwastek lays the historical and theoretical groundwork with discussions ofprocessual strategies of twentieth-century art and theories of aesthetic experience, processaesthetics, play, and performance. She then develops an aesthetics of interaction, discussing suchaspects as real space and data space, temporal structures, instrumental and phenomenal perspectives,and the relationship between materiality and interpretability. Finally, she applies her theory tospecific works of interactive media art, including narratives in virtual and real space, interactiveinstallations, and performance -- with case studies of works by Olia Lialina, Susanne Berkenheger,Stefan Schemat, Teri Rueb, Lynn Hershman, Agnes Hegedüs, Tmema, David Rokeby, Sonia Cillari, andBlast Theory.