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Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life
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Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio...
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10 November 2020

Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art’s historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.
Price: $65.00
Pages: 304
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
10 November 2020
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780520303911
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
Janet Kraynak is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies program (MODA). She is the author of Nauman Reiterated and editor of Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words.
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Digitization and Anti-Democracy: The Perils of Digital Utopianism
1. Network Effects: Networked Centralities and Political Marginalization
2. Collaboration and the Hive Mind: Social Networks and the Gendering of the Economy
3. Therapeutic Participation and the Museological User: The Museum in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
4. Modularity and the Alterities of Search: Racialization, Difference, and Computational Systems
5. Audible Pasts and Imaginary Futures: On Silence and the Technological Imaginary
6. In Lieu of a Conclusion
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
Introduction. Digitization and Anti-Democracy: The Perils of Digital Utopianism
1. Network Effects: Networked Centralities and Political Marginalization
2. Collaboration and the Hive Mind: Social Networks and the Gendering of the Economy
3. Therapeutic Participation and the Museological User: The Museum in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
4. Modularity and the Alterities of Search: Racialization, Difference, and Computational Systems
5. Audible Pasts and Imaginary Futures: On Silence and the Technological Imaginary
6. In Lieu of a Conclusion
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index