Muriel Cooper (1925–94) worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than four decades as a graphic designer, an educator, and a researcher. Beginning in the early 1950s, she was the first designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, where she visualized the latest scientific research in print. In the late 1960s, she became the first Design and Media Director for the MIT Press, rationalizing its publishing protocols and giving form to some of the period’s most significant texts in the histories of art, design, and architecture, among other fields. In the mid-1970s, Cooper co-founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture. There she taught experimental printing and explored new imaging technologies in photography and video. And from the 1980s until her death, Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, where she turned her attention to the human-computer interface. Cooper helped cultivate a design culture at MIT. And before her premature death, she established some of the metaphors and mentored some of the designers that have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Few 20th century designers have made significant contributions in both print and digital media, or helped to navigate the epochal transition between the two. Yet Cooper, in designing and redesigning roles for herself within new fields at MIT, did just that. Over her career and across multiple media, Cooper’s concerns remained quite consistent: She focused on developing both design tools and user experiences that would provide greater control and quicker feedback, eventually to be aided by machine intelligence. She sought to create experiences that were dynamic rather than static and simultaneous rather than linear, ones that engaged multiple media and a range of human senses. Cooper applied her knowledge of print design to software, and considered print and the process of its production as a prototype for the experiences that she would seek on screen. She also borrowed freely from media such as photography and film to inspire some of the effects she would later explore in new media. Cooper’s career traced an arc, in her practice and her pedagogy, from a focus on objects to one on systems. And her relationship to the digital evolved from a set of effects to be emulated in other media to seeing the computer at first as a tool, then as an assistant, and finally, as the medium itself. At the same time, she participated in a broader shift during this period from the paradigm of the humanist subject to the digitally augmented, “posthuman” condition of the present. In her interests and her achievements, Cooper exceeded any traditional definition of a graphic designer. At the same time, her work has defined the present state of the field. This dissertation, the first dedicated to Cooper, charts her pathbreaking career at MIT while also shedding new light on vital moments in the history of art, design, architecture, and media in postwar America.

Contemporary art market in China has influenced Taiwan¡¦s art market recently. The number of auction houses and new art galleries has been increased in Taiwan. The researcher discovered that the work of New Media Art has represented by galleries gradually. However, the sale of work of New Media Art is still limited. The reason is that the work of New Media Art lacks of physical form, and it can be easily replicated, which is contradicting to the traditional collectors¡¦ perspectives. This research attempts to understand how the New Media Art be promoted through galleries¡¦ perspectives. Three questions are raised in this research: First, How is the partnership between galleries and new media artists? And what service galleries provide to the collectors? Second, how galleries manage the product of New Media Art? And how it is different from managing other traditional art works? Third, how galleries interact with external environment, such as competitors, governments, enterprises, museums, academic departments, curators and auction houses? And how these environmental factors influence galleries while managing the work of New Media Art? Cross-case studies are used as the research methodology. Eleven galleries were interviewed, including East Gallery, IT Park, Lin & Keng Gallery, Galerie Grand Siecle, Main Trend Gallery, AKI Gallery, Chi-Wen Gallery, VT Artsalon, Soka Contemporary Space, Project Fulfill Art Space, and Gallery 100 (by establishing time). Methods of data collection include observation, document analysis and interviews. Triangulation is used to increase the credibility and trustworthiness. In conclusion, this research shows the New Media Art is still one of the commodities that the galleries sell. In order to respond to variable formats of New Media Art, galleries need to take different actions to promote them. Few suggestions are generated from this research: First, the work of New Media Art can easily be replicated; therefore, the government should assist to develop more effective technology to prevent the work be duplicated. Second, solving the restriction on the circulation of knowledge by promoting the concept of copy left. Third, galleries should have a more clear policy in consignment and licensing. Fourth, encouraging hi-tech corporations to sponsor hardware, and be responsible for equipment repairing. Galleries will only need to responsible for software of the work. Fifth, art education is good way to increase consumers¡¦ understanding on New Media Art. Galleries should connect with the museums effectively. Sixth, curators involve in commercial art galleries improve the value of the exhibitions. Galleries and curators should work on the details of cooperation. Seventh, galleries should host hung events in order to improve the interaction with communities. Eighth, while the Taiwanese contemporary art market is developing, galleries should monitor the quality of art, and develop long-term career path for artists.

This thesis focuses on the contextualization of my artistic practice, which explores digital glitch as a disruptive force and an aesthetic treatment in the contemporary technological world. While the body of work draws on the methodology of glitch art, this paper attempts to relate the idea of glitch to a wider range of philosophical and artistic frameworks stemming from Lettrism, Situationist International, Punk, and Nihilism. The aim of this investigation of a digital disturbance through its categorization into natural, stimulated and assimilated glitch, is to facilitate an understanding of the glitch event as both something threatening and attractive, while it transitions from a spontaneous to a controlled process in a photoreal image. The passing of the destructive glitch from life to art is placed against the backdrop of the apocalypse, which one may imagine as a literal and metaphorical disaster in the physical world and value systems of western society. / vii, 113 leaves ; col. ill. ; 29 cm

How interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept. The sophistication and complexity of the philosophical concept concerning relationships between land and people and between people, intrinsic to the laws and customs of Australian Indigenous society, has begun to be communicated and accessed beyond the realm of anthropological and ethnological domains of Western scholarship. The exciting scope and rapid development of new media arts presents an innovative means of creating an interactive relationship with the general Australian public, addressing the urgent need for an understanding of Indigenous Australian concepts of relationship to land, and to each other, absent from Western narratives. The study is framed by an Indigenous concept of place, and relationships between land and people and between people; and explores how this concept can be clearly communicated through interactive new media arts. It involves: a creative project, the development of an interactive new media art project, a website work-in-progress titled site\sight\cite; and an exegesis, a Novella of Ideas, on the origins, influences, objectives, and potential of creative practices and processes engaged in the creative project. Research undertaken for the creative project and exegesis extended my creative practice into the use of interdisciplinary arts, expressly for the expression of philosophical concepts, consolidating 23 years experience in Indigenous community arts development. The creative project and exegesis contributes to an existing body of Indigenous work in a range of areas - including education, the arts and humanities - which bridges old and new society in Australia. In this study, old and new society is defined by the time of the initial production of art and foundations of knowledge, in the country of its origins, in Indigenous Australia dating back at least 40,000 years.

The Name is a Guest of the Substance brings together works of video, installation, live performance, sculpture, and print to investigate the constructions of kinship that organize us into the world as historical, ecological, and political subjects. Herter Gallery’s 1600 sq. ft space is utilized in full for this project. The work in both galleries evaluates systems of categorization in light of their power to foster or discourage kinship within overlapping local, global and ecological communities. While the West Gallery uses my own multi-racial American genealogy to challenge the authority of historical and autobiographical origins, the East gallery uses manipulations of scale to emphasize the overlooked and ungovernable ways non-human forms of life frustrate our constant attempts at establishing a stable hierarchy of biological relations.

Historically, Surrealism is defined as a literary and artistic movement which developed from Dadaism in the early twentieth century. Many artistic and literary historians assess that the lifespan of Surrealism did not persist beyond the 1960’s – that in fact, after notable surrealist such as René Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali challenged the limited cultural assumption of rationalism, the pursuit to explore and visualize the subconscious faded from artistic ambition. However, the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative notion that suggests that digital interactive mediums – such as contemporary games and virtual technologies – have revitalized Surrealism, enabling game developers to build upon the initial philosophies made popular by the avant-garde movement. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

“McLuhan’s Bulbs” argues that the 1960s movement of “light art” is the primary site of negotiation between the discourses of “medium” and “media” in postwar art. In dialogue with the contemporaneous work of Marshall McLuhan, who privileged electric light as the ur-example of media theory, light art eschewed the traditional symbolism of light in Western art, deploying it instead as a cipher for electronic media. By embracing both these new forms of electronic media and also McLuhan’s media theory, light art ultimately becomes a limit term of the Greenbergian notion of medium-specificity, heralding the transformation of “medium” into “media” on both a technological and a theoretical level. This leads to a new understanding of the concept of media as not peripheral, but rather, central to the history and theory of contemporary art. Drawing on extensive archival research to offer the first major history of light art, the project focuses in particular on the work of leading light artist Otto Piene, whose sculptural “light ballets,” “intermedia” environments, and early video projects responded to the increasing technological blurring of media formats by bringing together sound and image, only to insist on the separation between the two. Piene’s position would be superseded by the work of light artists who used electronic transducers to technologically translate between light and other phenomena, particularly sounds. These artists are represented here by Piene’s close friend and colleague, Wen-Ying Tsai. In the spirit of earlier examples of “computer art,” Tsai’s “cybernetic sculptures” used light to announce that art would no longer be defined by its material substrates, anticipating the fluid condition of media that we associate with new media art, and digital technology more broadly, today.

Master of Visual Arts / This thesis is an exploration into the ether of the digital aesthetic. It attempts to capture a segment of the continually morphing space then deconstruct and analyse it through electronic and new media art. Herein you will find a questioning of technology and control within electronic and new media art as an investigation into better understanding the current media image and visual culture that so powerfully influences the modern social construct. By nature this argument has existed for some years but only now with advancements in technology and more affordable realisation of ideas by media artists, the topic of the digital aesethetic, technology and control has become relevant for popular debate. As war lingers in our minds, terrorism hits headlines, and experiements in cloning human DNA take place, the technology that society demands can only necessarily be seen as a major contributing factor to today's strange times. However, strange or not, the questions I wish to discuss; Does technology determine contemporary society or do we determine technology? Where does the control exist?

Thesis (M.A.-Res.)--University of Wollongong, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 107-115.

Master of Visual Arts / This thesis is an exploration into the ether of the digital aesthetic. It attempts to capture a segment of the continually morphing space then deconstruct and analyse it through electronic and new media art. Herein you will find a questioning of technology and control within electronic and new media art as an investigation into better understanding the current media image and visual culture that so powerfully influences the modern social construct. By nature this argument has existed for some years but only now with advancements in technology and more affordable realisation of ideas by media artists, the topic of the digital aesethetic, technology and control has become relevant for popular debate. As war lingers in our minds, terrorism hits headlines, and experiements in cloning human DNA take place, the technology that society demands can only necessarily be seen as a major contributing factor to today's strange times. However, strange or not, the questions I wish to discuss; Does technology determine contemporary society or do we determine technology? Where does the control exist?