A brilliantly designed, authoritative, and open-minded attempt to ground the slippery terrain of digital art, Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais's new book traces the changing nature of 21st-century artistic practice and reception. Ippolito and Blais are co-directors of the University of Maine's new media program, and the two bring an academic sensibility to what could otherwise be a coffee-table book, which means insightful single-page missives on dozens of genre-busting artists that are nevertheless overwritten in a mix of professorial and Internet jargon. Cleverly dividing the book into six parts describing new creative fields, the authors tackle computer code-based art, games, online autobiography, hacktivism, computer virus making and preservation, and community building. The authors are most successful at describing how art's expanding frontiers are stretched not only by familiar net denizens such as JODI and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, but by unexpected sources such as zoologist Tom Ray, who studies digital communities for insights on evolution, and political pranksters like the Yes Men.

The New Museum Store hosts a book launch for At the Edge of Art on September 8.