The New Museum and the MIT Press Announces 'Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Centruy'

The New Museum and the MIT Press are pleased to announce the release of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, coedited by Lauren Cornell, Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives, at the New Museum, and Ed Halter, Founder and Director of Light Industry.

WHAT
Mass Effect is the first volume in a new series titled Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture. This series revives the seminal collection of volumes on key cultural topics initiated in 1984 by the New Museum and the MIT Press, which produced six defining volumes on the field of contemporary art, including Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists (1989), and Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (1990). The new series, overseen by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, will build on this historic partnership to provide a platform for today's most pressing issues in contemporary culture.

WHY
Mass Effect is one of the first volumes to document and critique the evolution of art engaged with the internet in the twenty-first century. It includes newly commissioned essays, reprints of key texts, image portfolios, and transcribed discussions, debates, and lectures that offer insights and reflections from a wide range of artists, curators, art historians, and writers. Since the turn of the millennium, the internet has evolved from a relatively new medium to a true mass medium-with a deeper and wider cultural reach, greater opportunities for distribution and collaboration, and more complex corporate, political, and social realities. Mass Effect provides the first comprehensive look at the "second generation" of internet artists that emerged within this era, responding to a radically different set of conditions compared to the net.art pioneers of the 1990s. Charting a loosely chronological series of formative arguments, developments, and events, the anthology provides an essential guide to understanding the dynamic and ongoing relationship between art and new technologies.

CONCURRENT EVENT
In conjunction with the release of Mass Effect, the New Museum will hold its first annual Art & Technology Conference, copresented with Rhizome, in late January 2016. The conference will explore key aspects of art and technology today. Supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the groundbreaking nonprofit initiative Experiments in Art and Technology, the conference will convene artists, writers, curators, conservators, and entrepreneurs to consider technology's effect on cultural production, the quality and texture of contemporary criticism and debate, and how the widespread use of digital tools and mediums have eroded long-standing barriers between genres and disciplines.

CONTRIBUTORS
The editors of the anthology have both gathered and commissioned in-depth writing on artists such asCory Arcangel, Cao Fei, Paul Chan, DIS, Aleksandra Domanovi?, Mark Leckey, and Seth Price as well as pivotal curatorial projects such as And/Or Gallery, Radical Software Group, "surf clubs," and other artist communities, while providing historic background on recent terms such as "postinternet." The volume also tracks the broader international and political context as it bears on art: persistent war waged through advanced, increasingly invisible technologies, illuminated in works by Trevor Paglen; globalization as it affects the language of the art world, captured in the debate around "International Art English"; and the possibility for more distributed alliances and activism, as expressed during the Arab Spring. Contributors include:

Cory Arcangel, Karen Archey, Michael Bell-Smith, Josephine Berry Slater, Claire Bishop, Dora Budor, Johanna Burton, Paul Chan, Ian Cheng, Michael Connor, Lauren Cornell, Petra Cortright, Jesse Darling, Anne de Vries, DIS, Aleksandra Domanovi?, Harm van den Dorpel, Dragan Espenschied, Rózsa Zita Farkas, Azin Feizabadi, Alexander R. Galloway, Boris Groys, Ed Halter, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Jogging, Caitlin Jones, David Joselit, Dina Kafafi, John Kelsey, Alex Kitnick, Tina Kukielski, Oliver Laric, Mark Leckey, David Levine, Olia Lialina, Guthrie Lonergan, Jordan Lord, Jens Maier-Rothe, Shawn Maximo, Jennifer McCoy, Kevin McCoy, Gene McHugh, Tom Moody, Ceci Moss, Katja Novitskova, Marisa Olson, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Alexander Provan, Morgan Quaintance, Domenico Quaranta, Raqs Media Collective, Alix Rule, Timur Si-Qin, Paul Slocum, Rebecca Solnit, Wolfgang Staehle, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, Ben Vickers, Michael Wang, Tim Whidden, Anicka Yi, and Damon Zucconi.

Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century can be purchased at the New Museum Store or online at newmuseumstore.org. The volume is available to the general public for $44.95 and to New Museum Members for $38.21.

Media contacts should email press@newmuseum.org for more information or to request a review copy of the publication.

ABOUT NEW MUSEUM
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub for new art and new ideas.

ABOUT THE MIT PRESS
The MIT Press, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2012, is the only university press in the United States whose list is based in science and technology. This does not mean that science and engineering are all we publish, but it does mean that we are committed to the edges and frontiers of the world-to exploring new fields and new modes of inquiry. We publish about two hundred new books a year and over thirty journals. We are a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science, and we have a long-term commitment to both design excellence and the efficient and creative use of new technologies. Our goal is to create books and journals that are challenging, creative, attractive, and yet affordable to individual readers. For more information, please visit mitpress.mit.edu.