Stephen Wilson — Information Arts — field-defining survey

2002

Artists: Stephen Wilson · Year: 2002 · Medium: Survey book — comprehensive treatment of art intersections with science and technology · Substrate: Published book, MIT Press, 945 pages with approximately 300 illustrations · Place: San Francisco, California, USA · Institution: San Francisco State University; MIT Press Stephen Wilson's Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (MIT Press, 2002) is a 945-page comprehensive survey of late-twentieth-century art practices at the boundary with sciences and technologies — including computer art, bio-art, interactive-media, robotics-art, and dozens of other subfields. The book is encyclopedic in its scope; Wilson gathered and synthesized material from hundreds of practicing artists, organized across subject-area chapters (biology, physical sciences, mathematics, kinetic art, etc.) with extensive bibliographies and contacts. Information Arts is used as a teaching text in new-media programs worldwide. Its particular contribution is not theoretical sophistication (Manovich's book, published the previous year, is the theoretical companion) but rather exhaustive documentation. Wilson mapped the field as it existed at the turn of the millennium with a thoroughness no one has replicated since. The book's bibliographies and contact lists remained reference resources for a decade after publication. Wilson was a practicing artist as well as a scholar — his own work at the intersection of conversation-based and installation art placed him within the field he was documenting — and his role at San Francisco State University's Conceptual and Information Arts program made the program one of the major American MFA programs in new-media practice. His book remains in print and remains in active use. Lore Stephen Wilson was a longtime professor at San Francisco State University, where he had held a faculty position since 1981 and had founded the university's Conceptual / Information Arts program in 1986. Information Arts was the culmination of fifteen years of teaching: Wilson spent roughly five years writing the manuscript at his small SF studio. The book was published by MIT Press in 2002 at a substantial cost — over 900 pages with hundreds of color illustrations — and became one of the most widely-adopted survey textbooks in American art-and-technology programs through the 2010s. His archive is held at SF State and his teaching legacy is preserved through several of his former students who now teach in similar programs. Sources • Wilson, Stephen — Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (MIT Press, 2002) • San Francisco State University — Conceptual and Information Arts archive • Leonardo — Wilson obituary (2011)