{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03553008595988539, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0166189111747851, 'mean_word_length': 5.191489361702128, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Rethinking Art as Interrelation

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 264. $40.) and Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen’s Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 952. $50.) exist at an intersection of scholarly interest in technology and contemporary art. What marks them for joint review, apart from their appearance in the Leonardo Book Series that pioneered dissemination of work in this burgeoning area of inquiry, is their insistence on art as a category that is both related to and distinct from technology. In Bianchini and Verhagen’s succinct phrasing, “It is art that is at issue here, but art within a problematic that cannot be divorced from a societal context increasingly conditioned by the exponential growth of information technology since the advent of cybernetics” (4). Paulsen too makes plain that her object domain is art viewed “through an art historical lens” (5), yet both books address what art does amidst a highly technologized present with titles that point to things that incorporate the prefix “inter-”: Paulsen’s “interface” and Bianchini and Verhagen’s “interaction.”1 In other words, questions of mediation and relationality figure prominently here despite a difference of approach. Here/There is a conventional art-historical monograph treating a continuous history spanning 1968 to the present, while Practicable is an omnibus involving two collaborating editors, Nathalie Delbard and Larisa Dryansky, that covers art from the 1950s to the present across fifty-seven texts by no fewer than sixty-six contributors with varying disciplinary commitments. Still, both books home in on the ways people and artworks engage in mutually transformative pro-