Books Library
A list of good book to read if you want to catch-up on web3 for the arts and culture. We attached small summaries to each reference and some tags to help you navigate the list.
| Resource | Summary | Link |
|---|---|---|
A Blockchain Art History Timeline (Cadence Kinsey PI and Ruth Catlow, 2020) | A feasibility study resulting of a collaboration between Cadence Kinsey PI (UCL) and Ruth Catlow, Co-founder and Artistic Director of Furtherfield/DECAL. | |
A Decade to Download - Internet Yami-Ichi (IDPW, 2022) | A book chronicling a decade of Internet culture
The Internet Yami-Ichi is a flea market-style event where people deal with “Internet-ish” items in real space. | |
Building on the concept of a DAO but informed through commons-based and cooperative-based logic, feminist economics, and open value accounting | ||
Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Sam Skinner and Nathan Jones, 2017) | Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still largely mythical technology. Includes DOCUMENTATION of artistic projects engaged in the blockchain, THEORISATION of key areas in the global blockchain conversation, and NEW POETRY, ILLUSTRATION and SPECULATIVE FICTION. | |
Curating Digital Art (Annet Dekker, 2021) | What is the role of the curator when organizing digital art exhibitions in offline and online spaces? This book focuses on how the experiments of curators, artists and designers have opened the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods of presenting and accessing digital art. | |
Digital Art (World of Art) First Edition (Christiane Paul, 2003) | Christiane Paul surveys digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s up to the present day. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she discusses all the key artists and works. The book explores themes addressed by and raised by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks, and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright. | |
Digital Art (World of Art) Fourth Edition (Christiane Paul, 2023) | The fourth edition of the essential introduction to digital art, one of contemporary art’s most exciting and dynamic forms of practice. | |
Digital Art (World of Art) Second Edition (Christiane Paul, 2008) | This book surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the 1980s up to the present day, and looks ahead to what the future may hold. It explores themes addressed and raised by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art. | |
Digital Art (World of Art) Third Edition (Christiane Paul, 2015) | The essential introduction to digital art, one of contemporary art’s most exciting and dynamic forms of practice – now in its third revised and expanded edition | |
How To Create And Sell NFTs - A Guide For All Artists (Magnus Resch, 2021) | The must-have NFT guide for artists, written by the leading specialists in the global art & web 3 industry. This book explores how artists can launch their own NFT projects. It features business advice from the NFT and art world’s foremost specialists. It is a vital guide for artists who wish to learn more about Web3 and the metaverse. | |
Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Omar Kholeif, 2023) | Tracing the key artists and innovators from the emergence of browser-based art to the dawn of NFTs, this is a tale for the present and the future. | |
Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Decentralisation (Jack Parkin, 2020) | Allegedly, software can create a more stable and democratic global economy; a world free from hierarchy and control. In Money Code Space, Jack Parkin debunks these utopian claims by approaching distributed ledger technologies as a spatial and social problem where power forms unevenly across their networks. | |
POÈME OBJKT/POÈME SBJKT - Exhibition Catalogue (TheVERSEVerse and L’Avant Galerie, 2023) | POÈME OBJKT/POÈME SBJKT is the companion anthology to a two-part exhibition in which language is both the subject and object of art. This group survey of writers, visual artists, typographical alchemists and creative technologists traces the trajectory of text as it evolves on and off the page, expanding the conventional bounds of how poetry is experienced via a multiplicity of mediums and technologies. | |
PROOF OF ART – A short history of NFTs, from the beginning of digital art to the metaverse (Alfred Weidinger, 2021) | Released in conjunction with the exhibition, the publication is designed less as an accompanying catalogue than as a handbook that sheds light on NFTs in their (art-)historical contexts, from the media art of the 1950s/60s to contemporary positions. | |
Proof of Work
Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021 (Rhea Myers, 2023) | DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. | |
Radical Friends (Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, 2022) | Radical Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts consolidates five years of research into a toolkit for fierce thinking, as well as for new forms of radical care and connectivity that move beyond the established systems of centralised control in the art industry and wider financial networks. | |
Rethinking Curating Art after New Media (Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, 2010) | In this book, the authors offer a selection of examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the role of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art’s characteristics | |
Technelegy (Sasha Stiles, 2022) | What does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? Fusing masterful verse by Sasha Stiles with captivating language experiments by her AI alter ego and full-color images of Stiles' critically acclaimed art, TECHNELEGY captures the thrill and peril of our intimate relationship with technology in a profoundly original and provocative hybrid text. |