Month: February 2016

Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field

Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, February 2016) Publisher’s website Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field situates media art—as technologies, practices, and experiences—in the politics of postsocialist Eastern Europe. It considers how artistic activity became representative of the tensions between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. Within this context, the book considers how media artists questioned and reimagined their site—historically, politically, technologically—and situates their works within the specific ecology of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history. This expansion of the global history of media art to include Eastern Europe’s heritage explores a key moment in Europe’s political and cultural history that brings together art history and criticism, media and cultural studies, globalization and nationalism studies, and political theory. In order to articulate a site-specific context to an art form often considered as belonging to the “non-place” of a global digital culture, the book proposes a genealogy of Polish media art through the lens of Polish experimentation, one that includes the Constructivists of …