The contemporary public domain, as a ‘free’ space where culture is produced and exchanged, is shrinking ever further owing to pressure from various developments. While the exchange, distribution and appropriation of cultural products (‘content’ in the form of music, images and texts) is actually becoming easier in digital society, there is also a move towards greater regulation and control, particularly in the guise of new copyright laws and policy concerning ‘intellectual property’. Instead of a ‘free culture’, the contours of a ‘permission culture’ (Lawrence Lessig) are emerging. Simultaneously, as an aspect of broader privatization and regulation processes, there seems to be a shift towards private entities (wealthy patrons, corporate sponsors, etc.) being able to appropriate more and more of the public domain’s component parts: public culture then falls into the hands of private individuals and businesses, and these entities decide what is made available or publicly accessible.
This issue of Open investigates the root cause of these developments, how they interrelate and what the implications are for the ‘free’ production and practice of culture, as well as for the internal dynamics and balance of power in the public domain.

There is also a Dutch language edition; Nederlandstalig editie

Since 1987, the year of its inception, the Prix Ars Electronica has served as a barometer for trends in the digital arts. It is also the award offering the highest prize money for cyber arts worldwide. Geared towards topical issues, it documents the shift in societal and artistic approaches brought about by communications and information media.
This lavishly illustrated volume features descriptions of the prize winning works, texts by the artists and the statements of the juries. The DVD presents a selection of works that were singled out for recognition; the CD offers samplings of what’s happening now in the digital music scene. 40 internationally renowned experts evaluate thousands of submissions in the Computer Animation / Film / VFX, Digital Musics, Interactive Art, Hybrid Art and Digital Communities categories, as well as the u19 - freestyle computing competition for young people. The Prix Ars Electronica also bestows a Media.Art.Research Award as well as [the next idea] Art and Technology Grant.

In the companion volume to the 2007 Ars Electronica Festival, artists, theoreticians and experienced network-nomads elaborate on our culture of everyday life and these late-breaking phenomena that are being played out between angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personae with digital media.
At any time, at any place, we’re capable of switching into telematic action, of reaching anyone and being accessed by all. With the help of our avatars, blogs and taggings, we assume digital form and adopt more or less imaginative second identities. But it’s not merely technology, information and communication that have become omnipresent. To a much greater extent, it’s we ourselves: traceable at all times and anywhere via our cellphone’s digital signature that makes it possible to pinpoint our location to within a few meters; classifiable via the detailed and comprehensive personality profiles that we unwittingly leave behind, the traces of all our outings in digital domains.
What’s occurring in the wake of these developments is a far-reaching repositioning and reevaluation of the political, cultural and economic meaning of the public and private spheres.

"The 1990s dream of cyberspace and its immaterial possibilities belongs to the distant past: our future will be material for some time to come. Matter rules, but modern biology has shown that matter is far from inert; it is ‘self-organizing’, ‘epigenetic’ and ‘transductive’ – three terms that are explored in this collection of essays and artistic interventions.
We all know that blueprints and plans for the future have been rendered obsolete, since nobody can predict or control processes like climate change or global flows of employment, fugitives and information. The interesting question now is what kind of exploratory behaviour we can come up with to create functioning networks – networks in which changes and flows can interactively select those that are most vital – and to find out what our role might be in this process of producing variation and selection.
Artists are pre-eminently placed to test, stretch, expand, twist and recombine matter into artistic forms and structures. In Interact or Die! the exploratory behaviour of artists is combined with essays by prominent authors in the area of ‘networks-intomatter’ and ‘matter-into-networks’ theory, such as Peter Corning, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, Noortje Marres, Brian Massumi, Detlef Mertins, Arjen Mulder, Gilbert Simondon, Lars Spuybroek and others." (Publishers text)

"Book of Imaginary Media. Excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium Where people fail our machines will succeed - it seems to be one of the most stubborn myths in Western society. We are incessantly being bombarded with films, books, street advertising and commercials about new gadgets, new media and new futures that seem suspiciously similar to all that precedes. Imagine the power ... of the umpteenth gadget. Imagine ... that technology can go where no human has ever gone before, that technology can succeed where no human has succeeded - not only in space or in nature, but also in the interpersonal, specifically in communication with the other.
This book investigates those technological myths and the dream of the ultimate communication medium from multiple perspectives. Building on insights provided by media archeology, Siegfried Zielinski, Bruce Sterling, Erkki Huhtamo and Timothy Druckrey spin a web of connections between the wonderful fantasy machines of Athanasius Kircher, the mania of stereoscopy, 'dead' media and archeological media art. Edwin Carels and Zoe Beloff descend into the cinematographic caverns of spiritualism and the iconography of death, while Eric Kluitenberg and John Akomfrah lift the lid on the imaginary connection machines and the 'mothership connection'. On the DVD, artistic jack-of-all-trades Peter Blegvad provides an hilarious commentary on the imaginary media with a son et lumière version of his On Imaginary Media. He also invited renowned cartoonists, including Ben Katchor, Thomas Zummer, Dick Tuinder and Jonathan Rosen, to depict their own visionary media fantasies." (Publishers text)

There is also a Dutch/Nederlandstalig edition

In 2006, the Prix Ars Electronica is presenting its twentieth edition. Over the years, the alliance of art, science, industry and commercial interests has rapidly evolved onwards and upwards. Internet, mobility, mixed reality, gaming and realtime are only some of the keywords denoting the state of the art. And it lies in the nature of things that artists worldwide, outside the mainstream of commercial offers and solutions, are taking on individual positions in this mobile, wireless, networked media world, while exposing and questioning power structures, political strategies and emerging economic systems. Underground activism and hackerdom have also become components of artistic concepts.
In this catalogue of the festival the world of computer animation, visual effects, digital musics, interactive art, net vision, digital communities, u19, and [the next idea] are presented in word and image.
The publication contains a CD-Rom and a DVD.

"SIMPLICITY is a complex topic that has no single, simple answer. We live in an increasingly complex technological world where nothing works like it is supposed to, and at the end of the day makes all of us hunger for simplicity to some degree. Yet ironically when given the choice of more or less, we are programmed at the genetic level to want more.“Would you like the big cookie or the smaller cookie?” or “Would you like the computer with ten processors or just one?” The choice is simple really, or is it?
For the Ars Electronica Symposium on SIMPLICITY we think together about what simplicity (and complexity) means in politics, life, art, and technology. Expect more than you can ever imagine, and less." (Editors text)

Thanks to new wireless technologies (WIFI, GPS, RFID) and mobile media, public space is subject to drastic changes. It is being traversed by electronic infrastructures and networks, and alternative cultural and social domains are evolving, though often invisible from a conventional viewpoint. The traditional physical and social conditions of the public domain are being supplanted by zones, places and subcultures that transcend the local and interlink with translocal and global processes. The question is whether there are also new opportunities for the individual and for groups to act, participate and intervene publicly in this hybrid, seemingly flexible space. How do people appropriate the new public spaces? Where does the 'public' take place in this day and age? Who shapes and moulds it by devising spatial, cultural and political strategies?
With contributions by Drew Hemment, Howard Rheingold, Saskia Sassen, Frans Vogelaar/Elizabeth Sikiardi, Noortje Marres, Koen Brams/Dirk Pültau, Marion Hamm, Kristina Andersen, Ari Altena, Daniel van der Velden, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Esther Polak, De Geuzen, Max Bruinsma and Logo Parc.
Open is a cahier about art and the public domain that is published twice per year. It considers the interaction between art, commissioner, place and public in relation to developments within new media, architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture and spatial planning.

There is also a Dutch language edition; Nederlandstalig editie

"The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labour in the Creative Industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy, and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today. Why have radical social-technical networks so often collapsed after the party? What are the key resources common to critical network cultures? And how might these create conditions for the invention of new platforms of organization and sustainability? These questions are central to the survival of networks in a post-dotcom era. Derived from experiences participating in network cultures, Rossiter unleashes a range of strategic concepts in order to explain and facilitate the current transformation of networks into autonomous political and cultural 'networks of networks'." (Publishers text)

"Digital mapping techniques are being developed to visualize online conversation, identify significant variants within vast data sets, represent links between memory and urban morphology, and harness collective intelligence to develop alternative designs for cities, companies and communities.
This anthology brings together an international roster of writers, artists and designers at the forefront of locative media practice, and assembles archival and digital maps - from a 16th Century woodcut to a specially commissioned GPS drawing along the Greenwich Meridian - to explore how cartographic techniques are being adapted to map the emerging environments of electronic communication.
Spanning from social networks to networks of territories, ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING charts the ascendancy of mapping as a critical mode of inquiry and creative activity - a metastragegy that transcends disciplines and reveals that dynamic relationships between space, data and social organization." (Taken from the cover text)

Our contemporary lives in the midst of visual media mean that everyone and everything wants to be visible. Success means visibility and visibility means success. This 'regime' also governs all forms of cultural production, 'high' as well as 'low'. Camiel van Winkel seeks out examples in this book, such as the sculpture terrace in Rotterdam, the Netherlands Architecture Institute's national architecture plaque and the behaviour of politicians on the campaign trail, but also film posters, reality soaps and the film The Matrix.
The author argues that the continuously expanding visual culture makes it necessary to reconsider the relationship between art and mass culture, between forms of autonomous and applied art.
The Regime of Visibility is a critical book that examines and interprets the various interfaces between visual art and other forms of culture - high and low - in an original manner. It could be seen as a sequel to Camiel van Winkel's first book, 'Moderne leegte. Over kunst en openbaarheid' ('The Modern Void. On Art and the Public Condition'), which was published in 1999 to wide critical acclaim.

There is also a Dutch edition

With its specific orientation and the long-standing continuity it has displayed since 1979, Ars Electronica is an internationally unique platform for digital art and media culture consisting of the following four divisions: Ars Electronica Festival, Prix Ars Electronica, Ars Electronica Center & Ars Electronica Futurelab. This platform has been an active force in the field of tension and interplay at the interface of art, technology and society. What began as an experiment in Linz, Austria, in 1979 has become, over a quarter of a century, the arbiter of the state of the art in international media culture.
"HYBRID-Living in Paradox, examines the implosive tendencies that digital technologies impose on the world, bringing cultures on top of each other and flouting boundaries: national, material, technological and psychological. Hybrid creations and creatures, identities and cultures emerge from re combinations of our three basic codes: numeric, genetic and atomic.
"HYBRID is the signature of our age, emblematic of the casualness with which we have established ourselves in real, physical habitats as well as in digital, virtual domains, of the way that dealing with and reconfiguring cultural differences and antipodes has become a matter taken completely for granted, and of the disturbingly routine nature of the way we play with the building blocks of life." (Cover text)

"Since 1987, the year of its inception, the Prix Ars Electronica has served as a barometer for trends in the digital arts. It is also the award offering the highest prize money for cyber arts worldwide. Geared towards topical issues, it documents the sift in societal and artistic approaches brought about by communications and information media.
"The artistic domains of contemporary media art are not only undergoing a fundamental change due to information technology applications, but also expanding and transcending traditional boundaries. Art in the social context has become just as pivotal for contemporary cyber arts as art-theoretical positions and discussions are. Digital acoustic spaces alter individual processes of perception, open source programming languages generate new creative potential, digital images and sounds turn into material which can be remixed as desired. Once again the Prix Ars Electronica epitomizes where things stand in today's culturally-oriented media discourse." (Cover text)

Mediamatic is a media culture space both on- and off-line which organizes exhibitions, public presentations and artist workshops, and co-produce media artist's work. These two new issues of the off-line magazine present in DVD form 'Mediamatic Screen 1-12' & 'Mediamatic Screen 13-20' which together contain "22 art works for your personal enjoyment, just add music". The contributors include: Gerald van der Kaap, Driessens/Verstappen, Maurer United Architects, Meggie Schneider, Will Holder, Mai Ueda, Vanessa Beecroft, Yariv Alter Fin, Jasper van den Brink, Mieke Gerritzen, a.o.

"'Back to things!' - This is the new motto of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an 'object-orientated democracy'. For the more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers assembled in this groundbreaking editorial and curatorial project, politics is not just a profession, sphere, or system, but a concern for things. Yet through the very word 'republic'(res republica) is already full of 'things' - things made public - it is these same things that are always forgotten. Through more than 900 illustrations and over 100 essays, this collection searches for democracy beyond the official sphere of professional politics, and explores public assemblies too often left out of a narrowly-defined discourse: laboratories, assembly lines, supermarkets, trade rooms, courts of law, bureaucratic institutions, churches, and natural resources such as rivers and climates.
This collection itself presents a significant public assembly, joining such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, and Peter Sloterdijk with the likes of Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. Ranging from the distant past to the troubled present, this collective effort examines the atmospheric conditions in which things are made public, and reinvests political representation with the materiality it has been lacking. This book, and the ZKM (Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe) show that it accompanies, aims to trigger new political passions and interests in a time when people need, more than ever, new ways to have their voices heard." (Publishers text)

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: Research and Development in Art" 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.

For 25 years now, Ars Electronica has been tracking and nurturing the digital revolution, analysing the social and cultural effects of digital media and communications technologies from the critical as well as utopian, artistic and scientific perspectives, thinking them through and inferring potential developments.
"Timeshift-The World in Twenty-Five Years" is the title of the 2004 festival; transformation, upheaval and the future are its programmatic concepts. The point of departure is reflection upon the past 25 years; the aim is to identify the developments that promise to be the driving forces in art, technology and society over the next quarter century.

The competition Prix Ars Electronica is an annual international forum for discussing current developments and trends outside commercial solutions in an increasingly networked, mobile, and wireless media world. 3341 projects from 85 countries were viewed and sorted out by experts in the competition's 18th year.
The resulting selection of computer animations, visual effects, digital music, interactive art, net vision, and digital communities is an exciting compendium of positions and visions in a media culture undergoing continuous change. The book is accompanied by 2 DVD's containing many of the prize winning works.

With its specific orientation and the long-standing continuity it has displayed since 1979, Ars Electronica is an internationally unique platform for digital art and media culture consisting of the following four divisions: Ars Electronica Festival, Prix Ars Electronica, Ars Electronica Center & Ars Electronica Futurelab. This platform has been an active force in the field of tension and interplay at the interface of art, technology and society. What began as an experiment in Linz, Austria, in 1979 has become, over a quarter of a century, the arbiter of the state of the art in international media culture.
This wide ranging anniversary volume features a wide range of texts, a comprehensive index of art projects as well as a glimpse behind the scenes, profiles, and commentary on the first 25 years. It is a lavishly illustrated retrospective look at the development of a project that has constantly focused on the future emerging in the present.

'Flips 8 Moview' features thirty-one outstanding motion-imagemakers over the globe: Adolescent, Digitalkitchen, Joe Togneri(Fabrica), Ben Tseng, Hisako Hirai, Lorenzo Fonda, Flying Machine, Framestore CFC, Gints Apsits, Gregory Brunkalla, Honest, Imaginary forces, Intro, Motion Theory, Ne-O, Nexus Productions Ltd, Now-Serving, Picture Mill, Pleix, Plus et Plus, Rei Inamako, Sartoria Comunicazione, Soft Citizen, Stiletto NYC, The Glue Society, The Ronin, Trollbäck+Company, Tronic Studio, Uvphactory, Xavier Cook, Yu+Co.

'Feelings Are Always Local' analyses ways in which networks organize, expand, join together and rearrange themselves from the inside out. Through the use of specific examples, the authors investigate how we live in networks, how possibilities are created there, how opportunities are seized, how escape routes are chosen, and how things sometimes go utterly wrong. The first question is scientific in nature: How do networks work? The second is political: How are the networks made manageable on a concrete, everyday level?
This newest book by the V2 organization contains contributions from: Arjun Appadurai, Mike Davis, Alex Galloway, Tijs Goldschmidt, Christopher Kelty, Seiko Mikami, Arjen Mulder, Karim Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, David Rokeby, and Christa Sommerer.

"Few digital designers and artists have had the long-term international impact of John Maeda. His work in the print and digital realms has influenced an entire generation of designers. His role as an educator is perhaps even more influential than his design projects but has largely remained out of sight. For seven years Maeda and his students in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab have created some of the most digitally sophisticated and exciting pieces of design to emerge anywhere.
'Creative Code' presents (for the first time outside the laboratory) the most fascinating work produced by the group, arranged into themes that apply to today's most pertinent design issues: information visualization, digital typography, abstraction, interaction design and education. Each section also features brief essays by leading names in the field of interaction and digital design including Casey Reas, David Small, Joshua Davis, Yugo Nakamura and Gillian Crampton Smith." (From the cover text).

"John Maeda deconstructs the digital world with the earned authority of an M.I.T.-trained computer scientist and a card carrying artist. Being ambidextrous with Eastern and Western cultures, he can see things most of us overlook. The result is a humour and expression that brings out the best in computers and art".
From the foreword by Nicholas Negroponte.

Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the 'digital image' encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable, he places the body in a privileged position - as the agent that filters information in order to create images. By doing so, he counters prevailing notions of technological transcendence and argues for the indispensability of the human in the digital era.
Hansen examines new media art and theory in light of Henri Bergson's argument that affection and memory render perception impure-that we select only those images precisely relevant to our singular form of embodiment. Hansen updates this argument for the digital age, arguing that we filter the information we receive to create images rather than simply receive images as preexisting technical forms. He argues that this new 'embodied' status of the frame corresponds directly to the digital revolution: a digitized image is not a fixed representation of reality, but is defined by its complete flexibility and accessibility. It is not just that the interactivity of new media turns viewers into users; the image itself has become the body's process of perceiving it.

Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the internet. In 'How Images Think' Ron Burnett explores the transforming relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are "thinking". Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines.

'Future Cinema', created by ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, is the first major international anthology of current video-,film-,and computer-based work that embodies and anticipates the new cinematic techniques and modes of expression created by a new class of experts.
"Based on the exhibition of the same title, the book for the first time brings together a large number of highly significant installations, multimedia and Net-based works produced in the digital field by both young and established international artists exploring algorithmic procedures and immersive and technologically innovative environments, such as multi-screen, panoramic and dome projection, shared multi-user and online configurations, and multi-location virtual environments. Another focus is on works exploring creative approaches to the design of interactive, non-linear, modular narrative content. The catalogue also documents the historical trajectory of those many and variegated cinematic experiments that prefigure, inform, and contextualize our current cinematic condition: the cinematic imaginary beyond film."

Media theory is a relatively young study area having come into being in the last 60 years. Arjen Mulder, co-founder of the media thinktank V2 and educator attempts in this book to create a synthesis of the numerous theories that have been formed and put forth internationally during the last 50 years. By discussing ideas, models and theoretical propositions in relationship to actual situations and experiences Mulder creates a study which gives clear and accessible insight into a sometimes complex matter.

Catalog of the yearly Festival for Art, Technology and Society held in Linz Austria. This catalog brings together the theoretical reflections of participating artists and elaborations on projects presented at the festival. The result is a dynamic overview of the entire range of facets and levels of significance of the festival theme.
Code-The Language of Our Time lays out three thematic domains- Code=Law, Code=Art, and Code=Life- in treating the influence and role of digital code in art and society, and it makes an important contribution to the aesthetics of the cyberarts in their link-up with scientific and technological progress.

This book investigates the state of panoptic art at a time when issues of secutity and civil liberties are on many people's minds. Traditioal imaging and tracking systems have given way to infinitely more powerful 'dataveillance' technologies, as an ever-evolving arsenal of surrogate eyes and ears in our society shifts its focus from military to domestic space. Taking as its point of departure an architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham that became the model for an entire social regime, CTRL [SPACE] looks at the shifting relationships between design and power, representation and subjectivity, imaging and oppression from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
The contributors include a.o.: Geoffrey Batchen, Jean Baudrillard, Duncan Campbell, Robert Darton, Gilles Deleuze, Wolfgang Ernst, Michel Foucault, Dan Graham, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Paul Virilio and Slavoij Zizek.

The authors argue that contrary to the dictum that our computers should be invisible information appliances they are in themselves a medium like printing, film, radio and television. Bolter and Gromala want to show what digital art has to offer to web designers, education technologists, graphic artists, interface designers, and HCI experts. The book examines recent works of digital art from the 'Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2000'. The fact that these works have been included in such an important computer conference shows that digital art can be considered among the purest forms of experimental design.

"Debates & Credits", a Dutch/Russian Art & Media project, explored the poetics and politics of public space in Amsterdam, Moscow and Ekaterinburg in the Fall of 2002, through a series of media art actions specifically designed for the urban landscape.
This book reflects upon the outcome of these actions and presents the invited essays, photo and video reports by the various curators representing the fields of art, media, design, urbanism, and social & political theory.

My First Recession starts when the party is over. The study maps the transition of critical Internet culture from the midlate nineties Internet euphoria up until the dotcom crash and the subsequent downfall of the global financial markets and '911.' Ignoring techno-libertarians who blame governments for the 'tech wreck,' the study sets out to critically examine contemporary Internet culture. What happens when new media become widespread? After having a good laugh about absurd dotgone business plans it is time to prepare for the tough battles ahead. Internet wars are on the rise. Fuelled by spam, viruses and server attacks, tensions on the ever-expanding Net have increased dramatically. Open, egalitarian Internet communities have become vulnerable. The 'online Other' is no longer met with hospitality. The general climate has become one of paranoia, conspiracy and distrust. Every downloaded e-mail or piece of software can turn out to be a fatal Trojan horse.
Internet critic Geert Lovink looks into the ambivalent attitude artists and activists take as they switch back and forth between euphoria and scepticism. The book contains case studies of dotcoms, the internal dynamics of virtual communities, the stagnant situation of online audio and video, debates over how new media can be taught and designs for a 'free software society'. The central question is which information architectures deal best with information overload? How can Internet as an unfinished project maintain its liberty? Is filtering contrary to the philosophy of openness? Do peer-to-peer networks such as Napster, weblogs and wireless networks offer a way out of the growing discontent around new media?

The new media field has been developing for more than 50 years. This extensive anthology collects the texts, videos, and computer programs- many of them now almost impossible to find- that chronicles the history and form the foundation of this still-emerging field. These texts are from computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. They cover the period between World War II (when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext first appeared) and today.
The CD Rom accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. There is also digitized video, documenting new media programs and artworks for which no operational version exists.

Working with image databases, sound databases, interdisciplinarity and interaction design were the topics of a series of master classes organized by C3/Budapest, AEC/Linz, ZKM/Karlsruhe and V2/Rottterdam.
This publication shows the theory and the practice developed by these classes.

Since 1965 video has become a serious and influential medium in the world of visual art. The Netherlands have played a prominent and in some cases a pivotal role in the development of video art since the late sixties. Organizations such as De Appel, Montevideo and Time Based Arts gained international recognition as innovating podia for a growing number of practitioners and a loyal audience.
The Magnetic Era traces the development of video art in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1985.

Information is Alive plunges into data flows from all kinds of disciplines that study archives: paleontological, cultural, political, sociological, historical, artificial, neurological, artistic. The atomization of the archive in the database has made the whole Art of Memory into a technological, interactive art that suddenly becomes a highly urgent topic. First, for all those institutions that feel the need to 'open their archives', second for all those who describe and study modes of being, third for all those who design and use new archives, be it books, websites, cities or other forms.

For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that can help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media.
The interviewees include Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun, Bruno Latour, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Lev Manovich, and Slavoj Zizek. The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep auto space, European media philosopy, the Internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identies, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the Internet and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations.

According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it. In 'Dark Fiber', Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith in the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers' groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control.

This collection of essays is published to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam, a multidisciplinary thinktank and platform concerned with information and communication technologies.
"Metatag intends to contextualize the Society's activities and reflects on the role of new media culture within general society. Technological parameters are in constant flux. After multimedia and the Internet hype, we are now approaching the first flaw in the wireless revolution. Information and communication technologies have become an economic factor with its ups and downs. With the global economy and the network society becoming one and the same phenomenon, technology isn't just an isolated world of (male) engineers anymore. Information technology has penetrated society, and society is about to penetrate technology.
The common desire was and still is to democratize new technologies, making them accesible to new audiences. New media culture is more than providing the cultural sector with websites and CD-ROMs. It is about the making of a rich and diverse discourse, both in critical-reflexive and speculative-utopian terms. The Waag Society is one of many nodes in a growing network of cultural medialabs. Metatag attempts to express this culture, in text and image, on paper, for old and new audiences."

The global reach of contemporary media has greatly influenced social, political, and physical space. Indeed, we are becoming inhabitants of information space. Net_condition investigates the consequence of this phenomenon that is radically altering the public and the private sphere, and the possibilites of creativity in the networked sphere.
This richly illustrated collection of writings on networked global media and their effect on contemporary society brings together the work of critical writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells, Claudia Gianetti, Edward S.Hermann, Armand Mattelart and Siegfried Zielinski. The book is copublished with the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The rapid growth of the Internet and the Web is transforming the way information is accessed and used. New models for distributing, sharing, linking and marketing information are appearing. This volume examines emerging economic and business models for global publishing and information access, as well as the attendant transformation of international information markets, institutions and businesses.

In the past 25 years the electronic arts have left behind their pioneering days and grown into a fully fledged and richly varied form of art. The essays in this book describe the cultural, scientific, art-historic, military-political and socioeconomic backgrounds with which electronic art is in dialogue. Also included are interviews with pioneers and theorists of electronic art. The book is illustrated with full-colour photographs and other documentation of V2 Organisation in Rotterdam. Published by De Balie, Amsterdam.

Machine Times investigates the way in which time is built into technological and social systems, and presents artistic approaches to the manipulation, distortion and elimination of time. The book contains essays and interviews by Francisco Varela, Detlef Linke, Mark C.Taylor, Eugene Thacker, Douwe Draaisma, Atau Tanaka, Kodwo Eshun, Robert Levine, and Peter Weibel. Art works by art+com, Gerald van der Kaap, Andrej Ujica, Mari Soppela, Perry Hoberman, Ana Giron, Eike, tx-transform, John F.Simon jr., Marnix de Nijs, Akitsugu Maebayashi, Ron Kuivila, Christian Kessler, a.o. Machine Time accompanied the Dutch Electronic Art Festival and features its exhibition and symposium.

In a nomadic and disruptive world, the question of transcultural relations surfaces again and again, each time with greater urgency. The Jan van Eyck Akademie dedicated part of its experimentally creative research programme to a deeper investigation and re-assessment; over the last three years, under the guidance of Jean Fisher, a symposium - Reverberations - was organised. This attracted a large community of artists, philosophers, political activists, designers, technicians, and workers. "Reverberations" emerged from the conversations and exchange and captures in large part this rare mixture.

Preferred Placement turns the tables on Web analysis to date. Instead of celebrating the Web and all its prospects for creative artistry, democracy and e-commerce, the contributors to this volume calmly go backstage to look at how search engines, portals, default settings and collaborative filtering are formatting the surfer and offering passage to the media. A colourful spectrum of thinkers query the medium's preferencing and recommendation mechanisms with an eye towards articulating, and learning from the new knowledge politics on the web.
This is the newest volume in the highly acclaimed series published under the auspices of the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht and The Balie in Amsterdam.