The Engagement Aesthetic Experiencing New Media Art through Critique

Long after painting, sculpture, photography, and film developed along with their materials - canvas and panel, marble and bronze, and celluloid film - a new generation of art has emerged in which digital, electronic, architectural, and performative materials have offered new forms for creative expression and experience. In much of this new art, the medium - no longer composed of passive materials - now embraces and challenges viewers to work as co-creators of aesthetic experience.

Starting from the impossibility of understanding this new and complex art solely within the framework of contemporary art history and criticism, The Engagement Aesthetic offers new modes of critique for new media works of art, literature, and performance that operate in complex ways. Blending a range of methodologies from phenomenology, art history, linguistics, and statistical analysis, Ricardo explores how a new kinship between individual participation, electronic media, virtual and actual space, and mediated language results in a new aesthetic of mutual engagement.

Francisco J. Ricardo, Ph.D., writes about contemporary and new media art theory and criticism. Affiliated with the University Professors of Boston University, he is cofounder of the Digital Video Research Archive, and also teaches digital media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Preface 1. The Engagement Aesthetic - An Introduction PART I. IMAGE 2. Engagement as Meta-Reflection -- Andrew Neumann's Industrial Wall Panels 3. Engagement as Transcendence -- The Transmodal Work of Art 4. Engagement Across the Aural/Visual - Marclay's Media Metonymy 5. Engagement as Post-formal Imagery -- Anne Spalter's Scenes from the North Pole of Transcendence 6. Engagement in Virtual and Actual Gallery Space7. Engagement from Photographic Object to Statement 8. Engagement from Objecthood to Processhood PART II. SPACE 9. Engagement as Nonlocality -- The Aura of the Distributed Moment 10. Engagement in Projective Dance Performance 11. Engagement as Cathexis -- The Affective Index in Video's Depiction of Desire 12. Engagement as Spatial Chronotope in Electronic Art and the Public Sphere 13. Engagement across Space and Structure in Post-Architecture 14. Engagement as Social Spatiality 15. Engagement as Participation, Mediated and Recursive PART III. LANGUAGE 16. Engagement as Post-Literary Mechanism, an Historical Argument 17. Engagement as Post-Literary Mechanism, From Exposition to Reflexivity 18. Engagement as Empirical History -- Metaprogramming 19. Engagement as Comparative Communication -- Formalisms of Digital Text 20. Engagement across Shifting Beliefs: Shamanism, Turing, and ELIZA