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Media, Art, and Society: Interface of the Digital Image, Aesthetics, and Culture

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Abstract

This chapter surveys the dominant trends and significant turning points in the changing perception of how media, art, and society have been discussed academically, with an emphasis on the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. This incorporates an overview of salient developments in the philosophy of aesthetics during this period. It then proceeds to examine the more recent question of how digital technology has impacted on this nexus of interaction. While there is no commonly accepted consensus among academia with regard to the long-term implications of this impact, it is nonetheless possible to distinguish certain emergent changes in the spheres of narrative, persona, and spectacle within contemporary media and art, and it is possible to identify an emergent aesthetic regime which accounts for artistic experiences across a number of increasingly integrated media platforms and an expanded conception of the contiguity of aesthetic experience transcending individual perception and traversing the organic and the material. As a final section several symptomatic and suggestive case studies are raised to discuss how these play out in more concrete instances.

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Correspondence to Alistair D. Swale .

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Swale, A.D. (2015). Media, Art, and Society: Interface of the Digital Image, Aesthetics, and Culture. In: Nakatsu, R., Rauterberg, M., Ciancarini, P. (eds) Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-52-8_21-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-52-8_21-1

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