Edward A. Shanken

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Edward A. Shanken
Edward A. Shanken at Art Center College of Design, Media Design Practices.jpg
Born1964
EducationPhD in Art History, Duke University, MBA, Yale School of Management, BA, Haverford College
OccupationProfessor
Employer University of California, Santa Cruz
Known forresearch at the intersection of art and technology
Website http://artexetra.com

Edward A. Shanken (born 1964) is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cruz. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon Press, 2009), among other titles.

Contents

Background

Edward A. Shanken graduated from Haverford College (1986) and then obtained an MA (1999) and Ph.D. (2001) in Art History from Duke University after receiving an MBA from Yale University in 1990. He was the executive director of the Information Science Information Studies program (ISIS) at Duke University from 2001 to 2004. From 2004 to 2007 Shanken was Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design and Senior Researcher at the UCLA Art | Science Center and Visiting Scholar at the California NanoSystems Institute from 2007 to 2008. [1] He joined the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam in 2008, where he served as Universitair Docent, New Media and Digital Culture, 2008-2010 and as a Researcher, 2010-2012. In 2010, he was the inaugural Louis D. Beaumont Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2007 he has served on the faculty of the Media Art Histories MA program at Donau University, Krems, Austria. In 2013 he joined the faculty at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at University of Washington. [2] In 2016, Shanken joined UC Santa Cruz as Director of the innovative Digital Arts/New Media (DANM) MFA program. [3]

Shanken has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was formerly chair of the Leonardo Education Forum and a member of the College Art Association Education Committee and has served as an advisor to the Media Art Histories conference, ISEA, the journal Technoetic Arts, and the Leonardo Pioneers and Pathbreakers project. He has conducted extensive research on the theorist and art critic Jack Burnham and into cybernetics as applied to systems art in the 1960s. [4]

Research Activity

Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and technology in the 1960s, interactivity and agency, the historiography of art and technology, parallels between conceptual art and art and technology, and the cultural implications of cybernetics, telematics, robotics, and biotechnology. [5] Shanken’s current research examines art-science collaboration and the relationship between the discourses of mainstream contemporary art and new media art. Following the first concern, he chaired the panel discussion,"Artists in Industry and the Academy: Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations" at the 2004 Annual Conference of the College Art Association and served as guest editor of a special series of essays under the same title in the Leonardo Journal (38:4 and 38:5) in 2005. More recently he guest-edited a special series of essays, “The Reception and Rejection of Art and Technology: Exclusions and Revulsions,” which appeared in the journals a minima (Mar 2008) and Leonardo 42: 2 (Apr 2008). Following the second concern, he organized and chaired a panel discussion with Nicolas Bourriaud, Peter Weibel and Michael Joaquin Grey at Art Basel in June 2010 (see external link below) and organized and chaired a panel discussion at the College Art Association Annual Conference (CAA) in 2011, the papers of which were published in a special issue of ArtNodes (see links below). A further research area is the use of social media to expand and democratize the production and dissemination of art criticism. This is exemplified by the Art and Electronic Media Online Companion, a Web 2.0 site.

Teaching Activity

Shanken currently teaches at UC Santa Cruz. He has previously taught media and art history at Rhode Island School of Design, Duke University, Savannah College of Art and Design, the University of Amsterdam, Donau University (Austria), the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington.

Publishing Activity

Shanken is the editor of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, the collected writings of Roy Ascott (University of California Press, 2003). [6] His essay, "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2004. His book Inventing the Future: Art, Electricity, New Media was published in Spanish in 2013. He is also the editor of the anthology Systems published in 2015 through Whitechapel and MIT Press.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive art</span> Creative works that involve viewer input

Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist or the spectators to become part of the artwork in some way.

Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE Electronic Language International Festival, Transmediale (Berlin), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz) and readme have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.

<i>The Pleasure of the Text</i> 1973 book by Roland Barthes

The Pleasure of the Text is a 1973 book by the literary theorist Roland Barthes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic art</span> Art that uses or refers to electronic media

Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.

Information art, which is also known as informatism or data art, is an art form that is inspired by and principally incorporates data, computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, and related data-driven fields. The information revolution has resulted in over-abundant data that are critical in a wide range of areas, from the Internet to healthcare systems. Related to conceptual art, electronic art and new media art, informatism considers this new technological, economical, and cultural paradigm shift, such that artworks may provide social commentaries, synthesize multiple disciplines, and develop new aesthetics. Realization of information art often take, although not necessarily, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches incorporating visual, audio, data analysis, performance, and others. Furthermore, physical and virtual installations involving informatism often provide human-computer interaction that generate artistic contents based on the processing of large amounts of data.

Kenneth E. Rinaldo is an American neo-conceptual artist and arts educator, known for his interactive robotics, 3D animation, and BioArt installations. His works include Autopoiesis (2000), and Augmented Fish Reality (2004), a fish-driven robot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experiments in Art and Technology</span> Non-profit organization

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit and tax-exempt organization, was established in 1967 to develop collaborations between artists and engineers. The group operated by facilitating person-to-person contacts between artists and engineers, rather than defining a formal process for cooperation. E.A.T. initiated and carried out projects that expanded the role of the artist in contemporary society and helped explore the separation of the individual from technological change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy Ascott</span> English cybernetic artist

Roy Ascott FRSA is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Planetary Collegium</span>

The Planetary Collegium is an international transcultural and transdisciplinary new media art educational research platform that promotes on the doctorate level the integration of art, science, technology, and consciousness research under the rubric of the technoetic arts. It is based in the School of Art, Design and Architecture department at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom with nodes in Trento, Lucerne and Shanghai. Since its inception in 1994, over 80 doctoral candidates have graduated from the Planetary Collegium with Plymouth University PhDs. The founding President is Professor Roy Ascott.

Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. Telematics was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in The Computerization of Society. Roy Ascott sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systems art</span> Art influenced by cybernetics and systems theory

Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics, and systems theory, that reflects on natural systems, social systems and social signs of the art world itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Burnham</span> American art historian (1931–2019)

Jack Wesley Burnham Jr. was an American writer and theorist of art and technology, who taught art history at Northwestern University and the University of Maryland. He is one of the main forces behind the emergence of systems art in the 1960s.

Technoetics is a neologism introduced by Roy Ascott, who coined the term from techne and noetic theory, to refer to the emergent field of technology and consciousness research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hybrid art</span> Art that works with science and technology

Hybrid art is a contemporary art movement in which artists work with frontier areas of science and emerging technologies. Artists work with fields such as biology, robotics, physical sciences, experimental interface technologies, artificial intelligence, and information visualization. They address the research in many ways such as undertaking new research agendas, visualizing results in new ways, or critiquing the social implications of the research. The worldwide community has developed new kinds of art festivals, information sources, organizations, and university programs to explore these new arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet art</span> Form of art distributed on the Internet

Internet art is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

Paul Sermon was born 23 March 1966, in Oxford, England. Since September 2013 he has worked as Professor of Visual Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New media art</span> Artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies

New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies. It comprises virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, immersive installation and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts such as architecture, painting or sculpture.

Cybernetic art is contemporary art that builds upon the legacy of cybernetics, where feedback involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The relationship between cybernetics and art can be summarised in three ways: cybernetics can be used to study art, to create works of art or may itself be regarded as an art form in its own right.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sherrie Rabinowitz</span>

Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950–2013) was an American video artist and a pioneer in satellite-based telecommunications art. She worked exclusively with Kit Galloway under the moniker Mobile Image from 1977 onwards. She co-founded the Electronic Café International (ECI), a performance space and real café housed in the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, with Galloway. She died in 2013, from complications due to multiple sclerosis.

Media art history is an interdisciplinary field of research that explores the current developments as well as the history and genealogy of new media art, digital art, and electronic art. On the one hand, media art histories addresses the contemporary interplay of art, technology, and science. On the other, it aims to reveal the historical relationships and aspects of the ‘afterlife’ in new media art by means of a historical comparative approach. This strand of research encompasses questions of the history of media and perception, of so-called archetypes, as well as those of iconography and the history of ideas. Moreover, one of the main agendas of media art histories is to point out the role of digital technologies for contemporary, post-industrial societies and to counteract the marginalization of according art practices and art objects: ″Digital technology has fundamentally changed the way art is made. Over the last forty years, media art has become a significant part of our networked information society. Although there are well-attended international festivals, collaborative research projects, exhibitions and database documentation resources, media art research is still marginal in universities, museums and archives. It remains largely under-resourced in our core cultural institutions.″

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Key Essays