Product Description

Gravity-defying sculptures that can only exist in cyberspace...an interactive opera in which members of the audience become part of the performance...fractal images that rival nature's greatest masterpieces.

Digital Mosaics is the first book to explore the new digital media and the variety of art forms emerging from our computer culture. It is destined to change our traditional perceptions and definitions of digital expression.

Through the works of cutting-edge computer artists, composers, and designers, Digital Mosaics explores the possibilities of the digital medium and how it radically transforms the way art is produced and understood by the audience. Presenting an astonishing collection of examples, Digital Mosaics illuminates the qualities that make digital expression different from all previous artistic endeavors. From his discussion of the changing meaning of "original" art -- digital creations are at once infinitely reproducible and essentially ephemeral -- to his insights into the impact this kind of art has on the relationship between artist and audience, Steven Holtzman gives readers an unprecedented look at the new aesthetic that is laying the groundwork for the digital and art worlds of our future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2053439 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-14
• Released on: 1998-07-14
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .65" h x 6.14" w x 9.23" l, .70 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Amazon.com
While we are constantly reminded that the digital medium is like none other, Steven Holtzman wants us to realize that we're not yet aware of just how different it is. The areas of uniqueness and its deeper capabilities as a means of artistic expression are just beginning to be explored. Holtzman takes us on a tour of some of the most exciting of these explorations. Moving back and forth among technical issues, artistic visions, and artistic technique, he pushes the door just a bit wider to reveal glimpses of new possibilities. While what's being done is exciting, the real wonder, Digital Mosaics shows, lies in the knowledge that today's artistic innovations pave the way for unexpected visions tomorrow.

From Library Journal
This work is an engrossing exploration of what Holtzman (Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds, LJ 6/1/94) believes is a fascinating march into a cultural realm as compelling as the New World that once tempted Columbus. Are you aware, for example, of the profound changes already brought about by the explosion of CD-ROMs, the World Wide Web, and virtual reality, which allow us, by nature of their nonlinearity, to jump from idea to idea, independent of the constraints of space and time? If you are, you are ready to greet the next generation of digital media, or "mosaics," which Holtzman says will reshape the very ways we think, much the way the alphabet has shaped thought and influenced the world for thousands of years. Literate, entertaining, and more than a little bit thrilling, the ideas herein will set readers on a course to a fertile land whose possibilities will lure them to disembark?and never look back. For all computer collections.?Geoff Rotunno, "Tri-Mix" Magazine, Goleta, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The aesthetics governing traditional architecture, art, music, and sculpture have been extended in the digital domain to allow more interactive and personalized encounters. Holtzman, who is both a computer musician and product marketing executive, tours the digital avant-garde: virtual cities where Web surfers hyperlink and cyber cafes where avatars chat; fractal art that approaches the infinitesimal; digital DNA that tracks the evolution of fictional flora and fauna; musical labyrinths created interactively in a Web-based theme park. Digital technology is nonlinear, Holtzman reminds the reader. Linear aesthetics are approaching a dead end, but a way out is offered through hyperlinks that allow users to direct their own path through the "start-anywhere go-anywhere experience" delivered in the mosaiclike world of cyberspace. Holtzman reins in his enthusiasm briefly to acknowledge certain limits in the digital world--pixelated images, flat textures, finite CD-ROM speeds, and so on. Nonetheless, he foresees the ultimate demise of books and print media, even though the footnotes in his own book primarily refer to printed materials. George Eberhart