Aspect magazine
Encyclopedia
New media art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...
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ASPECT is notable for being one of the first DVD-based chronicles of time-based media. ASPECT’s DVD format offers artists using installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, animation, sound, and visual techniques a way for their work to be recorded and distributed to the greater art community. Each submission has an audio commentary by an expert in the field, and each issue is identified by a common theme.
The publication is used largely as an educational tool, but is also available for subscriptions and for purchase in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
and The New Museum. ASPECT provides those working in new media art
New media art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...
with access to their contemporaries’ work and grants them a critical take on the work to help contextualize it within the larger art world
Art world
The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and sale of art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,...
.
Since its founding in 2003, ASPECT has published 9 volumes, each one featuring 5-10 artists and addressing a specific theme. Past themes include: ‘Artists of the Boston Cyberarts Festival,’ ‘Artists of the West Coast,’ ‘The Artist as Content,’ ‘Text and Language,’ ‘Joie de Vivre,’ ‘On Location,’ ‘Personas and Personalities,’ 'Rural,' ‘Early Works,’ and ‘Performance.’
In addition to the biannual magazine, ASPECT occasionally creates and distributes other DVDs of a single artist’s work, which lend outside of the periodical format. Past features include monographs of Douglas Weathersby’s "Environmental Services: Projects for TV" and "The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an award-winning American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...
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In October 2006 ASPECT released ‘The Tipping Point,’ a documentary of a large scale collaboration which chronicles the lives of four artists living in South Boston as they create an interdisciplinary interactive artwork based on their own health narratives.http://www.aspectmag.com/issues/merchandisedetail.cfm?merchandiseID=11
History
ASPECT was founded in 2003 by artist and educator Michael Mittelman. The mission of the publication is to distribute and archive works of time-based art. Each issue highlights artists working in new or experimental media, whose works are best documented in video or sound. ASPECT began when Mittelman was frustrated with the lack of teaching materials available in the field of Interrelated Media. After meeting with leading curators such as George Fifield, Director of the Boston Cyberarts FestivalBoston Cyberarts Festival
The Boston Cyberarts Festival is the first and largest Festival of digital art, performance and film created using new technology in the USA. Around 22,000 people attended the Festival in 2007 where they witnessed the work of over 200 artists from all over the world.The Festival takes place once...
, and Bill Arning, Curator at the List Visual Arts Center, led Michael to the conclusion that curators and artists would gladly participate in a DVD publication of their work, and Volume 1: Artists of the Boston Cyberarts Festival was born. Rooted in its mission of distributing and archiving art that is best documented in video and/or sound, ASPECT has become one of the most well-established and respected DVD magazine in its field, having featured over 50 works and artists in its four-year history.
In November 2006 ASPECT was honored by the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, MA as part of an exhibition celebrating their 30th Anniversary, “PRC/POV Photography Now and The Next 30 years."
External links
- http://www.aspectmag.com
- http://www.myspace.com/aspectmag
- http://www.bu.edu/prc/prcpov/essay.html
- http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2007/04/22/a_magazines_new_way_to_cover_new_media/