Racing Cyberculture

"As the cultures of cyberspace began to emerge in the 1990s, "life on the screen" and virtual identity quickly moved to the fore of critical reflection about the meanings of the various cultural changes underway. Such examination of the changing face of cultural identity in the Internet era seldom produced any sustained or meaningful commentary, however, on the status of racial identity, or the ongoing work of racial formation, in the precincts of cyberspace. Racing Cyberculture: Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet explores new media art that challenges such effectively "race-blind" understandings of cybercultures. The book focuses on addressing key work from some of the most important artists to have responded to concerns related to racialization in cybercultures, including the new media arts collective Mongrel, the performance and installation artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the digital/conceptual artist and composer Keith Obadike, and the multimedia artist Prema Murthy. The author looks at how projects undertaken by these artists serve to highlight and reframe questions surrounding the contours and conduct of racial identity and racial ascription in the technoculture."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.