A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art

Description

Kate Mondloch examines how new media installation art intervenes in technoscience and new materialism, showing how three diverse artists-Pipilotti Rist, Patricia Piccinini, and Mariko Mori-address everyday technology and how it constructs our bodies. Mondloch establishes the unique insights that feminist theory offers to new media art and new materialisms, offering a fuller picture of human-nonhuman relations.

Kate Mondloch is professor of contemporary art and head of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. She is author of Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minnesota, 2010).

"Mondloch shows that new media art installations and theories of feminist materialism inform one another in ways of interest to artists, art historians, and new media and feminist scholars."-CHOICE "Mondloch's approach couples aesthetics and ethics through activist prose that is unafraid to embrace populism or pleasure, or to revisit theoretical and historical misreadings of the past (and present). This book does not attempt to explain anything. Rather, it practices, and invites us to practice, conceptual-material engagements with art, and thus sensation, perception, and action. Such practice, the author convincingly argues over the entirety of her manuscript, is intrinsically feminist."-Theory & Event "Mondloch shows that new media art installations and theories of feminist materialism inform one another in ways of interest to artists, art historians, and new media and feminist scholars."-CHOICE "Mondloch's approach couples aesthetics and ethics through activist prose that is unafraid to embrace populism or pleasure, or to revisit theoretical and historical misreadings of the past (and present). This book does not attempt to explain anything. Rather, it practices, and invites us to practice, conceptual-material engagements with art, and thus sensation, perception, and action. Such practice, the author convincingly argues over the entirety of her manuscript, is intrinsically feminist."-Theory & Event "Mondloch outlines the importance of feminist new materialisms as a means to critique the realms of new media art and technoscience, and positions Rist, Piccinini, and Mori as vital contributors to all these discourses."-ARLIS/NA "The fields of art, science, and technology are increasingly porous to each other, and Kate Mondloch insightfully explores the artistic interfaces where such exchanges occur."-Women's Art Journal