Snap to Grid

Peter Lunenfeld offers a personal and unconventional account of the interactive, networked age, charting how digital technologies have left their mark on our cultural imagination. He weighs new media against older forms and argues the case through technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory, paying close attention to the digital artists and designers he considers most significant.

The book opens with a familiar software habit: many users switch off the feature that straightens hand-drawn lines onto a precise grid, because accuracy comes at the price of expressiveness. Lunenfeld borrows this everyday trade-off as a way of thinking about the electronic culture surrounding us and about how we handle it.

He pushes back against the idea that digital media will either save or ruin us, and he situates new media within the political and economic conditions that shaped them after 1989, testing theoretical claims against the practical limits of making work. The artists he discusses include Mark Amerika, Char Davies, Hollis Frampton, William Gibson, Gary Hill, Perry Hoberman, JODI, Christian Moller, Adam Ross, Jennifer Steinkamp, Stelarc, and Diana Thater.