From Image to Interaction: Meaning and Agency in the Arts

In From Image to Interaction, Amsterdam-based essayist and media theorist Arjen Mulder retells the past 500 years of visual arts to construe their culmination in the interactive art of today. Mulder investigates the origins of modern art from Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo through Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, reframing art history throughout as media history, and accurately positioning these figures not only as great artists but also as great media theorists. This account of all art as a kind of “media art” underlines the experimental component of artistic endeavor: you test an idea (or a medium) which may stand or fall. Mulder's refreshingly unreverent approach to art history includes in-depth analysis of the sensations and experiences that are aroused by painting and photography, establishing corollaries in digital media and the interactive arts.