Changescapes

Ross Gibson moves between scholarly and artistic worlds, writing about cultural objects and ideas, making multimedia works, films, poetry, curating in museum spaces, and creating installations, among other pursuits. This book of essays arises from Gibson's experience over a decade of creating artworks and developing a range of theories that engage with complexity, changefulness, and aesthetic force; themes particularly germane to contemporary culture in electronic and globalized societies. A 'changescape' is a special kind of artwork - dynamic, tendency-governed, ever-reactive, and never finished - helping us to understand and accept complexity and mutability. Changescapes are everywhere in contemporary culture: as improvised music and social collaborations, in interactive and responsive multimedia installations, in adaptive simulation experiences and faux-ecological environments. Ross Gibson mixes case studies and cultural theories in this book to pose questions of how we might understand the form and complexity of changescapes, and what such work can teach us. [Changescapes is a companion volume to Ross Gibson's Memoryscopes.