Shifting Interfaces

Book excerpt: Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big-data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on the field, with a considerable representation of art-based research gaining salience in media art studies. The collection attends to art projects interrogating the destabilisation of identity and the breaching of individual privacy, the rekindled interest in phenomenology and in the neurocognitive workings of empathy, and the routes of interconnectivity beyond the human in the age of the Internet of Things. Offering a diversity of perspectives, ranging from purely theoretical to art-based research, and from aesthetics to social and cultural critique, this volume will be of great value for readers interested in contemporary art, art-science-technology interfaces, visual culture, and cultural studies.