Uncanny Networks

Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia

by Geert Lovink

Paperback
Hardcover

390 pp., 7 x 9 in,

Paperback
9780262621878
Published: February 27, 2004
Publisher: The MIT Press

$18.00

Hardcover
9780262122511
Published: January 27, 2003
Publisher: The MIT Press

$30.00

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Geert Lovink interviews an international group of artists, critics, and theorists on aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of new media.

For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that can help to create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references.The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the Internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific region, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the Internet, and the role of cyberspace in the rise of nongovernmental organizations.

Interviewees included Norbert Bolz, Paulina Borsook, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Cã¬©n Dan, Mike Davis, Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun, Susan George, Boris Groys, Frank Hartmann, Michael Heim, Dietmar Kamper, Zina Kaye, Tom Keenan, Arthur Kroker, Bruno Latour, Marita Liulia, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, Mongrel, Edi Muka, Jonathan Peizer, Saskia Sassen, Herbert Schiller, Gayatri Spivak, Já®¯s Sugá²¬ Ravi Sundaram, Toshiya Ueno, Tjebbe van Tijen, McKenzie Wark, Hartmut Winkler, and Slavoj Zizek.

Geert Lovink is an independent media theorist and net critic. He is the founder of nettime mailing lists, a member of Adilkno, and a cofounder of the online community server Digital City.

Geert Lovink has made one of the few interesting attempts at using theory to 'liberate' the Net from its fatal trajectory from militarism to the market. For a brief moment, a window opened, on a view outside, of a vanishing humanity.
Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Private Utopias and Sacred Drift

More than a mere collection of interviews, Uncanny Networks is a book of dialogues. Geert Lovink has as much knowledge of and experience with alternative media as any of subjects. Rather than approach them as a journalist or outsider might, he engages them as equals, eliciting deep and thoughtful responses.
Manuel de Landa, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

... an interesting and informative read.
Ted Kafala
RCSS

If you want to know what media theory will sayfive years from now, then read Uncanny Networksto see what Geert Lovink said five years ago. Fora futurist like myself, this useful, handy book saves time and trouble all around.
Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years