New Media Art: Introduction
The author first gives us a definition of “New Media Art” and then put many artists and works into historical and thematic context.
The author defines new media art as projects, which involve media technologies like Radical Software Group and are relevant to media art from diverse dimensions. Talking about my opinion of what new media art is, I consider it as any art projects involved modern technology, like Artificial Intelligence. I would focus more on the emerging media technologies while the author actually focuses more on the cultural, political and aesthetic possibilities of technologies.
The conception of new media art also has changed over time. Currently the revolution of technologies including social media, takes a dominant role in our daily life and changes our ways of creating arts and appreciate arts at the same time. Many kinds of artworks can be exhibited online through the internet and 3D Laser Scanning Technology. Creating artworks on a computer through painting apps and coding is also easy to realize.
The text mentions many artists and works and puts them into historical and thematic context. One work named Trigger Happy from the category of pop art is created in 1998. Triggerhappy is a gallery installation whose format is similar to early arcade game. In this game, the images of space Invaders combine with the text of requests for information. The artists who created this artwork are Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead who are London-based visual artists and whose works focus on video, sound and the internet. This artwork which is created in the period of the emerging of Internet, explores how the new technologies in their times influence human’s recognition of the world around them by using live data. This artwork also has similarity with new media art works which also have relationship with commercial culture.
Another work named Genetic Response System 3.0 from the category of Dada is created in 2001 by Diane Ludin. Diane Ludin is an artist and writer who uses the Internet as a material resource. She recycles existing Internet news media to collage a series of automated records of contemporary communication.This art work reflects “Each day new data emerges tracing the shifting boundaries between the ‘organic’ and ‘non-organic’. It associates the new technology with biology and the images and texts in it are fragmented. This work appeared in the era of revolution of internet. The strategies of this artwork like photomontage and collage are also used in new media artworks.