Title: Beyond New Media Art
Author: Domenico Quaranta
Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia
Format: 290 pages, soft cover, paperback, black and white, English | downloadable .pdf
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN: 978-1-2913-7697-5
Beyond New Media Art is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title Media, New Media, Postmedia (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. Beyond New Media Art is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age.
From the book’s preface:
“So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?”