"Database Aesthetics" examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.
Contributors: Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.
Victoria Vesna is a media artist, and professor and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Future Bodies from a Recent Past brings to life a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon in art and sculpture in particular: the reciprocal interpenetration of bodies and technology. With 120 works by 59 artists-primarily from Europe, the USA and Japan-the exhibition is dedicated to the major technological changes since the post-war period and examines their influence on our notions of bodies. With contributions on topics such as the influence of changing production technologies, materialities, and concepts of the body, but also interdisciplinary considerations of body-technology relations, a multi-perspective history of contemporary sculpture will be outlined. German Edition! Exhibition Museum Brandhorst Munich 2 June 2022 until 15 January 2023

The relationship between economy, finance and society has become opaque. Quantum leaps in complexity and scale have turned this deeply interdependent web of relations into an area of incomprehensible abstraction. And while the economization of life has come under widespread critique, inquiry into the political potential of representational praxis is more crucial than ever. This volume explores ethical, aesthetic and ideological dimensions of economic representation, redressing essential questions: What are the roles of mass and new media? How do the arts contribute to critical discourse on the global techno-economic complex? Collectively, the contributions bring theoretical debate and artistic intervention into a rich exchange that includes but also exceeds the conventions of academic scholarship.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974 - 1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. Exploring the connections between our current moment and t he point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large - scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space . It presents a tightly focused survey of monitor - based sculpture made since the mid - 1970s. The exhibition catalogue focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art's full institutional arrival - coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment - in the gallery and museum alongside painting and sculpture. Proposing to e xamine what aesthetic claims these works might make in their own right, the exhibition aims to resituate monitor sculpture more fully into the narrative between early video and projection as well as assert its relevance for the development of sculpture ove r the course of the 1980s in general.

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?