Sounding New Media

[Dave Monroe]

Frances Dyson
Sounding New Media
Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture

$60.00, £41.95 hardcover
9780520258983
$24.95, £16.95 paperback
9780520258990
262 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 8 b/w photographs
September 2009, Available worldwide

Sounding New Media examines the long-neglected role of sound and audio
in the development of new media theory and practice, including new
technologies and performance art events, with particular emphasis on
sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson
takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became
available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and
digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists
as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Antonin Artaud, and Char Davies. She
utilizes sound's intangibility to study ideas about embodiment (or its
lack) in art and technology as well as fears about technology and the
so-called "post-human." Dyson argues that the concept of "immersion"
has become a path leading away from aesthetic questions about meaning
and toward questions about embodiment and the physical. The result is
an insightful journey through the new technologies derived from
electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing, toward the
creation of an aesthetic and philosophical framework for considering
the least material element of an artwork, sound.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11235.php