Description
The Engagement Aesthetic details the first comprehensive overview of art practices that have, in recent years, been subjected to forms of mediation characterized as digital, electronic, new. Francisco J. Ricardo proposes an 'engagement aesthetic' as revealing certain commonalities in the practices of new media art and thus as providing a crucial critical framework. Considering several works per chapter, this collection of essays provides a unique perspective on how to critique new media works of art, literature, and performance in a way that moves beyond mere description, historical analysis, or formal properties of art works and looks at their creative culmination: the subjective experience of complex artworks in a new medium. He first examines specific works through structural description, moving to analysis of individual viewer perspectives, and ends with critical questions about the place of this perceptual experience in current ideological and institutional contexts. Previous attempts at a comprehensive critical media aesthetics have been based on analyses that are unable to cope with art in which 'artist, viewer and process' are necessarily and actively engaged.