Information Arts. . - Media - book review

Stephen Wilson

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001

Information Arts? Stephen Wilson's impressive tome that weighs in at 1024 pages invokes immediate parallels to other information sources in book form, such as the Yellow Pages or any unabridged dictionary. But such a superficial affinity does not approach an understanding of what this particular gathering of "information" entails. To lead us away from the labyrinthine world of omnipresent ISO symbols, Wilson offers the helpful subtitle "intersections of Art, Science, and Technology" to render his tripartite approach more legible, yet it is evident that the meeting points of art and science all start and end with a journey through the circuit board. [paragraph]

In a retrospect that has almost caught up with itself, it appears that the term "Information Technology" was one of those intermediate compromises used to find a utilitarian description for the alphanumeric soup spewed out by increased computational power. Wilson has applied "information" to art in much the same manner, trying to generally describe the structuring and patterning of data for epistemological purposes in a way that breaches and unites the transcoded intersections of common binary denominators. A more thoughtful consideration of this premise would have made the introductory chapter, entitled "Introduction, Methodology, Definitions, and Theoretical Overview," less concerned with a labored reconciliation of the adversarial roles played by art and science and more cognizant of the methods whereby this cultural integration is subsumed in the suggestive yet unsatisfactory use of "information." [paragraph]

The chapters that follow on the remaining pages are divided into topics largely defined by scientific research: biology; physics; mathematics and algorithms; kinetics and robots; telecommunications; digital information systems; and additional resources followed by appendixes on methodology and further reading. Each section is introduced with an overview that quickly proceeds to discuss specific artistic projects in tapering depth, lending some the attention of a paragraph and others the mention of a sentence. Like most ventures that are encyclopedic in scope and taxonomic in structure, this compilation of entries suffers from a shallowness that is great for sound bites, but inadequate for anyone interested in the knowledge formations associated with each term. Although Wilson purportedly seeks to facilitate understanding, the book never really attempts to engage the scientific discourses and offer readers a more informed view of the aesthetic forms they engage, expressions that are invariably derived from ext ensive research and imaged from prohibitively complex data structures. [paragraph]

Information Arts remains an essential work of reference where questions of narrative quality should be surpassed by questions of referential utility, but considering this change of roles, it must be noted how badly this resource has been organized. The book does not indulge in the art of information, and the reliance on sources and images from the World Wide Web has not allowed for a consideration of graphical navigation in place of linear reading. While the book's dominant syntax of a superficial summary aligns itself nicely with the encoded shorthand that increasingly passes for language, the structure of Information Arts ultimately misses the central points of its own inquiry.

Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts in Baltimore and the World, Issue 7: Code. Link Arts Inc./170 pp./$10.00 (sb).

Looking for Los Angeles edited by Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth. Getty Research Institute/330 pp./$45.00 (sb).

Making Digital Type Look Good by Bob Gordon. Watson-Guptill Publications/192 pp./$35.00 (sb).

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Nudes: The Blue House edited by Ariadne Kimberly Huque. Distributed Art Publishers/96 pp./$40.00 (hb).

Mapping the Legacy edited by Gene Ray. Distributed Art Publishers/224 pp./$35.00 (sb).

Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion by Stephen P. Hugler. Yale University Press/272 pp./$35.00 (sb).

No Place Like Home: Echoes from Home by Melanie Friend. Midnight Editions/160 pp./$39.95 (sb).

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