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An essential guide to the shifting vocabulary of art and technology, written by leading women artists and scholars.
The discourse around art and technology is saturated with hype cycles, accelerating innovation and proliferating terminologies. But what do our words reveal – and what do they obscure – about the conditions in which creative work is made, seen and understood?
Ways of meaning presents short essays by women artists, curators and scholars who are hacking tech-bro definitions to debug and recode common terms. The essays, running from aesthetics to worldbuilding, explore how language frames access, shapes power, structures meaning and mediates experience. At the same time, they trace how words are borrowed, reinvented, resisted or revived, accumulating distinct histories as they travel across geographies and identities.
At once reflective and critical, analytic and performative, Ways of meaning offers not fixed definitions but pathways, cross-references and provocations. It is an evolving yet time-bound compendium for navigating the intertwined terrains of art, technology and meaning today.
‘Energized by the shapeshifting nature of the art and technology lexicon—who uses what terms in what ways to describe which things—, the authors in Ways of meaning thoughtfully recast the glossary of terms on their own terms. The goal is not to fix definitions to words, but to allow for their expansiveness in how they are mobilized and interacted with by those who use them most. Ways of meaning is a smart reimaging of vogue words; gathering artists, writers, and creative technologists to say what aesthetics, code, data, model, metaverse, prompt, and more have come to mean from inside their practices.’
—Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Professor of English, University of Maryland
Charlotte Kent is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University. An editor-at-large with a monthly column on art and technology at The Brooklyn Rail, she contributes to assorted magazines, academic journals, catalogues and books.
Sarah Cook is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Glasgow. A curator and writer specialising in contemporary art at the intersection of digital creativity, technology and science, she has commissioned art for exhibitions worldwide.
Introduction: Ways of meaning: terms and conditions for art and technology – Charlotte Kent and Sarah Cook
Aesthetics – Tina Rivers Ryan
Ambiguity – Annet Dekker
Ancestral – Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
App(lication)s – Elisa Linseisen
Avatar – Skawennati
Body – Nancy Baker Cahill
Buffer – Mbali Dhlamini and Phumulani Ntuli (Preempt Group)
Cache – Luisa Ji
Changeability – Judit Bodor
Code – Linda Dounia
Consensus – Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Data – Pau Aleikum and Marta Handenawer
Dream – Suzanne Kite
Engineering – Tega Brain
Entrepreneurship – Sputniko! (Hiro Ozaki)
Extinction – Marietta Radomska
Future/s – Anna Ridler
Generation – K. Allado McDowell
Incubator – Bilyana Palankasova
Infrastructure – Iris Long
Location – Rebecca Noone
Machine – Jazmín Adler
Metaverse – Margaret Wertheim
Misalignment – Sara Niroobakhsh
Model – Lizzie Muller
Neutral – Magda Sawon
Objects – Doreen Ríos
Participation – Ling Tan
Platform – Faye Kabali-Kagwa
Posthuman – Ylva Fernaeus
Prompt – Sasha Stiles
Screen – Srushti Kamat
Search – Dora Bartilotti
Share – Amy Whitaker
Social – Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos (Daily tous les jours)
Touch – Yayoi Shionoiri with Megan Noh and Sarah Conley Odenkirk
Track/s – Lynette Wallworth
Worldbuilding – Clara Che Wei Peh
Index