"Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures"
by Peter Lunenfeld
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000)

The command "snap to grid" derives from a process in computer graphics
whereby freehand composition is quantized, or "snapped," to an imaginary
Cartesian grid. Like rounding fractions to the nearest integer,
"snapping to grid" takes imperfect hand drawings and rewrites them along
the more perfect lines of computerized composition. Peter Lunenfeld in
his new book, "Snap to Grid," inverts this seemingly undesirable mapping
of charming human imperfection onto rigid technology into a more
appealing process of dialogue between man and machine. "I have come to
think of the command 'snap to grid,'" he writes, "as a metaphor for how
we manipulate and think through the electronic culture that enfolds us.
This book is the result of snapping my seduction by the machine to the
grid of critical theory" (xvii). The grid, it seems, is not always bad.
And our own snapping–not the computer's–is the very process of
intellectual work.

Coming quickly on the heels of his edited collection "<a href='/object.rhiz?1471'>The Digital
Dialectic: New Essays on New Media</a>" (MIT Press, 1999), Lunenfeld's
latest snapping reads like a rambling sampler of digital art and
culture. "Snap to Grid" is quite digestible, but never too deep on any
particular issue. The reader's curiosity will perhaps be piqued by
Lunenfeld's delightful, if brief, discussion of telephone art and the
1969 exhibition "Art by Telephone" staged at Chicago's Museum of
Contemporary Art, or perhaps also by Lunenfeld's passing discussion of
Graham Harwood's CD-ROM "A Rehearsal of Memory" (127-8). Like the
networks he discusses, Lunenfeld's writing style is highly associative,
moving from the Beastie Boys to Martin Heidegger faster than an over-
clocked Pentium chip. Lunenfeld illustrates by example, but rarely
argues, riddling the pages of this text with a host of references.

Lunenfeld follows a trend common in current literature on new media, the
assumption that a book on digital culture should talk about information
society, rather than the computers themselves that make up that society.
To his credit, Lunenfeld has chosen not to contribute to the ever
growing genre of popular techno-hype literature embodied by authors such
as Ray Kurzweil and Nicholas Negroponte. He does much to cut through
this gee-wiz proselytizing, to focus on the real artists and engineers
driving our current cultural revolution. Yet his story lacks the
underground edge that is the true lifeblood of the digital arts.
Lunenfeld stays predominantly within the bounds of the established art
world, citing the work of artists such as eighties neo-geo painter Peter
Halley (xvii) or video artist Gary Hill (163). This is unusual for a
book on "digital arts." Further, Lunenfeld's discussion of art avoids
engaging at length with Internet artists, who as a whole have
undoubtedly contributed more to art making in the last five years than
the entire stale offline art world combined. More attention to Internet
artists such as "Knowbotic Research" (http://io.khm.de), a German artist
group who has achieved international acclaim, or the pseudo-corporate
"Etoy" (http://www.etoy.com), who have received more media attention in
recent years than all other digital artists combined, would bring
Lunenfeld's text back on course.

In a moment of clarity, Lunenfeld correctly characterizes the five year-
old artistic movement known as "net.art." His argument is that net.art
is primarily conceptual. "If we can indeed speak of schools in a medium
just a few years old," he writes, "then the 'net.art' movement has
indeed led the way towards a conceptually provocative practice for work
on the World Wide Web" (81). Lunenfeld is one of the first published
critics to recognize this fact. Lunenfeld's ongoing homage to pioneering
net artists Jodi is also refreshing. I share his sentiment when he
writes that "[f]or a good period of time, the only non-gallery, stand
alone arts Web site to which I returned for pleasure–rather than out of
a sense of information-age duty–was jodi.org" (82). There is also a
welcome discussion of artist Char Davies and the environments that she
has created using virtual reality hardware and sophisticated software
(93-5). Other digital artists mentioned in this book include Mark
Amerika and Stelarc.

In recent years the MIT Press has cornered the market on books about
digital art and culture, publishing everything from the historically
valuable "Ars Electronica: Facing the Future" edited by Timothy
Druckrey, to Paul Ceruzzi's useful reference text "A History of Modern
Computing" and Lev Manovich's exciting theoretical reflection on
computer aesthetics "The Language of New Media" (forthcoming). While
other publishers dabble in computerized hype, Lunenfeld's imprint has
penetrated to the core of computer society. "Snap to Grid" is a welcome
addition to this library and will certainly interest scholars and
dilettantes alike for years to come.

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[This review will appear in the "American Book Review" in May 2001.]