Kate Mondloch’s new book, A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) explores, in Mondloch’s own words, “how selected new media installations offer novel experiential environments for exploring, inhabiting, and even critiquing our entanglements with science and technology in the 21st century.”

Installation Archive: A Capsule Aesthetic, an online companion to her print work, built in Scalar, offers a collection of user-generated social media videos documenting viewers’ experiences with the installations discussed in A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art. As a collection of videos, Installation Archive offers a novel form of “crowd-sourced art historical documentation by bringing attention to the user-generated moving image uploads associated with these evocative works of art.” The videos included in this collection, depict installations from “idiosyncratic and subjective” points of view, according to Mondloch, “for example, user-added personal commentary or supplemental text, abnormal audio or ambient noises, multiple and sometimes unrelated works documented in a single video, and so on.” Yet, however subjective or idiosyncratic, these documented experiences prove to be incredibly valuable, underscoring, as Mondloch puts it, that “art spectatorship is inherently multiple because artistic experience itself is multiple.”

See A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art at the the University of Minnesota Press.

Check out Installation Archive: A Capsule Aesthetic.