Towards Visual Intellectuality: The Mediawork Pamphlet Series (An Interview by Elizabeth Guffey and Raiford Guins, Part 1)

Abstract

Peter Lunenfeld is a Professor in the Design | Media Arts department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is well known for his edited collection, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press, 1999), and his book, Snap To Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (MIT Press, 2001). Lunenfeld was also the Editorial Director for the innovative Mediawork pamphlet series published by MIT Press. Within the series, Lunenfeld’s own User: InfoTechnoDemo appeared in 2005. In the first of a two-part trans-journal interview, Elizabeth Guffey (Editor-in-Chief, Design and Culture) and Raiford Guins (Principal Editor, journal of visual culture ) interview Lunenfeld on a number of topics that touch on visual culture, design studies, art, media and cultural critique. The trans-journal interview is a collaborative initiative between academic journal editors to facilitate conversations across fields of study and subject matter by sharing a space where intellectual labor is conducted. In part one of this interview, Lunenfeld responds to a number of questions related to his Mediawork series and his concept of the ‘visual intellectual’. In the second part of this interview, published in Design and Culture 2(3), November 2010, our emphasis includes design theory and the digital humanities as recently brought together in the form of the NOWCASTING conference that Lunenfeld organized on 16—17 October 2009 and his forthcoming book, The Secret War Between Downloading & Uploading: Tales of the Computer As Culture Machine (MIT Press, 2011).