This well-written, erudite romp through several intellectual traditions is reminiscent of Douglas Hofstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach. I have a weakness for grand convergent visions, and Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mantras, took me for quite a ride.
Setting himself the task of theorizing a new digital aesthetics, Holtzman first traces in detail the development of modern linguistics, abstract painting, and Western music, interspersing this rather dense material with liberal references to Indian philosophy and personal stories of travels in Tibet. Digital Mantras does for these precursors what Brenda Laurel did for Aristotle and the theatrical tradition in Computers as Theater. Holtzman then analyzes more recent developments in digitally produced art and music, seeing computers as a means to an "integrated view of art, science, and the mystical."
His speculative answers to the question What means of expression are idiomatic to computers? tend to the abstract, envisioning virtual reality counterparts to serialist music. My own multimedia aesthetics spring from an all-inclusive palette of formerly separate media converging and opening up new artistic possibilities. But Holtzman argues - quite cogently - his narrower, structuralist view, judging the worth of different works by how well they fulfill the inherent structural demands of their particular media.
Digital Mantras, by Steven R. Holtzman, US$29.95. The MIT Press: (800) 356 0343, +1 (617) 625 8569, e-mail mitpress-orders@mit.edu.
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