Digital Art and Meaning

"Against an aesthetic thought that privileges erotics over hermeneutics and performative presence over meaning, Roberto Simanowski demonstrates in critical detail how the web has not spelt the end of interpretation, but has complicated it. Mobilizing the history and theory of the avant-garde from Apollinaire and Dada to situationsim and aleatoric poetry, he analyzes salient examples of digital art and literature, engaging with the ways in which code and programming, hypertext, collaborative writing, and interactive installations challenge notions of authorship and audience, reading and writing. A major work on the aesthetics of the digital media by a superb close reader who cuts across literary and media studies and opens up new dimensions for the humanities. A must read for programmers and humanists, engineers and artists alike." —Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University

"In a tightly interlocked set of readings of representative works ranging from concrete poetry to interactive installations, Roberto Simanowski makes a compelling case for a re-fashioned semiotic analysis that attends to the meaning produced by the formal intricacies of the work itself as well as by external processes of production and reception. In Simanowski, digital art finds the thoughtful, incisive, and erudite reader it truly deserves." —Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara