Introduction: the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader

A sampler containing many voices and visions-histories, critiques and calls to arms- this book has developed out of a particular networked community. A network both evokes and elides. For as Danny Butt asks in his contribution to this book, "How do we think what is not connected?" Or, for that matter, how can we know what (or who)we do not know? Do we as editors have a responsibility to make definitions, despite our awareness that any definition is partisan? Have we not already done so? Can we describe what is digital, what it means to make art on, influenced by, or manipulated through the computer, and do this without falling into the trap of valorising some things and rejecting others in order to construct a plausible progression? Despite Vasari's sixteenth century attempt to codify a linear method for art history, history has never been progressive. Nor has digital art. What you will find here are a wide range of accounts and artworks, some analytical, some personal, many offering provisional glimpses or definitions of digital art, and often in disagreement. This is the very foundation of ADA.