Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines-film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms-machine, media, exhibition-and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history. Contributors Rudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel

This book examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture, anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse, underground, and popular film. In The Anarchist Cinema, James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space, establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic, and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyze filmmakers, genres, and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.

Between 2014 and 2017, the artistic research project "Transcoding: From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture" encouraged creative participation in multimedia art via social media. Based on the artworks that emerged from the project, Barbara Luneburg investigates authorship, authority, motivational factors, and aesthetics in participatory art created with the help of web 2.0 technology. The interdisciplinary approach includes perspectives from sociology, cultural, and media studies, and offers an exclusive view and analysis from the inside through the method of artistic research. In addition, the study documents selected community projects and the creation processes of the artworks Slices of Life and Read me.