Technics Improvised

Timothy Murray is director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, professor of comparative literature and English, and curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. His numerous books include Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).

"In this moment when quarantines, lockdowns, masking, and social distancing regulations put a premium on the haptic, Timothy Murray’s book showcases the aesthetic exuberance and technical mastery of cutting-edge media artists who touch us through our screens. Tactical as well as tactile, touch, for Murray, is both active and activist-feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist. Drawing from decades of theorizing, critiquing, researching, curating, and archiving at the intersection of the digital and the performative, Murray argues for the essential significance of the improvisational turn from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, India, Palestine, Australia, Bolivia, and Ghana to New York and far beyond. Murray introduces us to a world of media artists to embrace… if only virtually." -Gina Marchetti, author of Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema"In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray brings together, revises, and remediates previously published essays, improvising an epistemological reading of five decades of what he terms new media art’s ‘incorporeal materiality.’ The first-person perspective Murray brings to his subject matter is invaluable: it reflects his participation-observation in the archive that he dis/assembles, his activating work against the enclosure of ‘new media’ as historical object." -Amy Sara Carroll, author of REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era"Murray uses his book to introduce artists working in digital and electronic media and traces their struggle against the government surveillance and corporate culture that control digital tools." -Cornell Chronicle

• PrefaceProlegomenon: When the Future Ain’t What It Used to Be, or New Media at Risk and the Improvisations of Art Part I. Activating Technics through Emergent Media1. Tactical Tools: From Fantasy of the Open to Networked Activism2. Ecotechnic Touch: Thinking Technics with Jean-Luc Nancy and Ryoji Ikeda 3. Archival Events: Situated Surfaces of New Medialized ArtPart Two. Critical Performance and the Temporality of Touch4. Clones: Genomic Simulacra in the Age of Recombinant Bodies5. Like a Prosthesis: Critical Performance @ Digital Deleuze6. Futurities, Uncertain: Screening Theatrical PhantasmsEpilogue. Future Fever, the Exposition: Ten Epistemological FictionsAcknowledgmentsNotesPublication HistoryIndex