Distributed Aesthetics

Issue 7 of The Fibreculture Journal
Edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/index.html

Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed in this issue a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters.  Distributed aesthetics concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be a sketch of reconsiderations of the operations of cultural memory or of phenomena such as endurance performances. But what we propose, through gathering together the disparate essays in this fibreculture journal issue, is that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of this distributed aesthesia.  In various ways, all the texts here take up the mode through which ‘the network’ – the juncture and disjunction of here and there, you and I, social and individuated – functions as the crucial operand in dispersing and contouring perception, art practice and aesthetics. This issue of the fibreculture journal signals important emerging trends and directions for critically engaged artistic practices and theories in and of the network.

With contributions from:
Darren Tofts
Geert Lovink and Anna Munster
Greg Turner-Rahman
Mark Amerika
Simon Biggs
Vince Dzekian
Edwina Bartlem
Susan Ballard
Keith Armstrong

And with thanks to the readers who assisted with comments and, as always, to Andrew Murphie