PARTICIPANTS
Peter Lunenfeld

Writer and critic Peter Lunenfeld is the author of Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Culture (MIT Press, 2000), and editor of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press,1999). His writings have been published in numerous journals including Afterimage, Film Quarterly, and Artforum, and a collection of his "User" columns from the international journal artext is forthcoming. Lunenfeld is the founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group; the editorial director for the MIT Press Mediawork pamphlet series, which focuses on the intersections of art, technology and utopian entrepreneurship; and a professor in the graduate program in Media Design at Art Center College of Design.

    Symposium Abstract: "Visual Intellectuals and Networked Ideals"

    Even when intellectuals are ostensibly not talking about words, they express themselves through, by, and with text to such an extent that what they generate can never be truly seen as a discussion about anything other than text. This explains the way that no matter how much art history, architectural criticism, or film studies claim to deal with visual and spatial systems, these discursive modes tend to resolve themselves finally around, well, around discourse itself. This is not to say that this text-based intellectual work is in the end about the craft of writing.

    But the long admitted though never addressed inadequacies of the academy notwithstanding, something new is brewing in the wake of the computer's dissemination through the humanities, and I would claim that we are about to witness the wide scale emergence of a breed of visual intellectuals.

    These would be people simultaneously making, pondering and commenting on visual

    culture, but in a way that doesn't follow the primacy of the word as with the text-based intellectual.

    Links:

    Mediawork Pamphlets: http://www.mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork

    Scott McCloud's Site: http://www.scottmccloud.com

    electronic book review (ebr): http://www.altx.com/ebr