Changescapes ― Complexity, Mutability, Aesthetics

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, amongst other pursuits. Changescapes is a book of essays that 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 globalised societies. A 'changescape' is a special kind of artwork - dynamic, tendency-governed, ever-reactive, never finished. They help us 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 Memoryscopes.