Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age

Abstracting Reality considers the relationship between digital technology and culture and their mutual influences on each other. The book begins with an examination of how everyday life became quantized over time, setting the stage for digital technology, which developed out of communication, machine control, and calculating machines. From there the book explores how digital technology changed the nature of art, inherent culture biases in digitization, composite imagery, machine-mediated communication, the metaphor of cyberspace, virtual reality, and finally, the way in which digital technology and imaging changes the very nature of indexicality itself.