Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments The writing of this book was undertaken while I held a “Discovery Project” grant from the Australian Research Council from 2003 to 2005. A section of chapter 4 was originally published in German as “Returns of the Diminishing Body” in Future Bodies. Visualisierung von Körper in Science und Fiction, edited by MarieLuise Angerer, Kathrin Peters and Zoe Sofoulis (Vienna : Springer Verlag, 2002), and a section of chapter 5 was originally published in Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader, edited by Arthur and Marie-Louise Kroker (Victoria, Canada: New World Perspectives/CTheory Books, 2004). A great many friends and colleagues have contributed to and supported the work that has gone into this book. I would especially like to thank Moira Gatens and Paul Patton for many years of intellectual generosity, comment and humor; Jill Bennett and David McNeill in the Center for Contemporary Art and Politics at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, for their ongoing collegiality and for understanding that new media aesthetics should be considered in a global and political context ; Andrew Murphie for the leading example that his work is to new media aesthetics, and for the intellectual support he has given me; and Geert Lovink for the invigorating mix of politics, pragmatism and theory that he has brought to the field and to our online and offline engagements. I have been inspired and encouraged by my collaborative work with a number of people and networks over the past few years. Intellectual and artistic networks provide the underacknowledged basis of a great deal of new media theory and artwork. For me, these include the online network fibreculture and particularly my discussions with Danny Butt, Chris Chesher and Ned Rossiter, and the editorial team of the fibreculture journal, especially Lisa Gye, Esther Milne and Gillian Fuller, who set such high and meticulous standards in their own work. In the project of editing a special edition of the online journal Culture Machine during 2004, Melinda Cooper was a marvellous colleague as well. A number of artists contributed directly and indirectly to making this book an exercise in taking seriously the conceptual work done by artists in producing information culture. I would like to thank Justine Cooper, Linda Dement, Diane Ludin and Trebor Scholz for their time and hospitality over the last few years. Finally, I would not have been able to write this book without the support of Michele Barker and the inspiration that her artistic work gives me. Her own sense of the aesthetic possibilities for new media xi is finely honed and her faith and encouragement have been the basis on which this project has been sustained. There are others—students, colleagues , friends and supporters—who are numerous and to whom I can only say thank you here. I would also like to thank those who have assisted with the preparation of this manuscript. Uros Cvoro has been an enthusiastic and efficient research assistant. The readers of this manuscript provided helpful commentary , and I would especially like to thank Ursula Frohne for her encouragement . The editorial team at University Press of New England has been extremely professional; in particular I would like to thank my editor, John Landrigan, for being so quick and efficient and for always being at the other end of an email. xii acknowledgments materializing new media ...