Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings - a video artist herself - reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, "pictures of nothing," but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.

Media screens--film, video, and computer screens--have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. "Screens" addresses this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes. Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, Kate Mondloch traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today's digital culture. Mondloch identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject's field of vision. As a result she proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.

How new media art informed by feminism yields important and original insights about interacting with technologies In A Capsule Aesthetic, Kate Mondloch examines how new media installation art intervenes in the fields of technoscience and new materialism, showing how three diverse artists-Pipilotti Rist, Patricia Piccinini, and Mariko Mori-contribute to the urgent conversation about everyday technology and the ways it constructs our bodies. A Capsule Aesthetic establishes the unique insights that feminist theory offers to new media art and new materialisms, offering a fuller picture of human-nonhuman relations. In-depth readings of works by Rist, Piccinini, and Mori explore such questions as the role of the contemporary art museum in our experience of media art, how the human is conceived of by biotechnologies, and how installation art can complicate and enrich contemporary science's understanding of the brain. With vivid, firsthand descriptions of the artworks, Mondloch takes the reader inside immersive installation pieces, showing how they allow us to inhabit challenging theoretical concepts and nonanthropomorphic perspectives. Striving to think beyond the anthropocentric and fully consider the material world, A Capsule Aesthetic brings new approaches to questions surrounding our technology-saturated culture and its proliferation of human-to-nonhuman interfaces.