Margot Lovejoy

Margot Lovejoy is a digital artist and historian of art and technology. She is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase and author of the books "Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age" and "Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media".

Biography

Margot Lovejoy is recipient of a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1994 Arts International Grant in India. Exhibited internationally, she has had many solo exhibitions in and around New York City including those at the Alternative Museum; P.S.#1 Contemporary Art Center; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art; Queens Museum of Art; Neuberger Museum of Art; Stamford Museum and the Islip Museum. Her work is in the collection of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art; the Getty Institute; and the Neuberger Museum.

Apart from authoring numerous essays in various journals, and catalogs, she has also been an invited speaker at conferences on art and technology internationally. Her website "Parthenia" has been archived by the Walker Art Center as part of the pioneering adaweb.com site and her website "TURNS" was featured in the 2002 Whitney Museum Biennial. She has published several visual books: "Labyrinth" in 1991 and in 1995 "The Book of Plagues", "paradoxic mutations" and "manifestations".

Digital Currents

In her best known historic work to date, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, Margot Lovejoy follows on the research of Frank Popper, Jack Burnham, and Gene Youngblood by documenting the historical record of the relationship between technology and art as culminating in digital art. Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making (video, computer art, the internet) by providing a context for the works of major artists in each media, describing their projects, and discussing the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field of digital art.

In Digital Currents she explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator. She demonstrates that just as the rise of photographic techniques in the mid-19th century shattered traditional views about representation, so too have contemporary electronic tools catalyzed new perspectives on art, affecting the way artists see, think, and work, and the ways in which their productions are distributed and communicated.

References

• Christiane Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 219
• Lieser, Wolf. Digital Art. Langenscheidt: h.f. ullmann. 2009 p. 283