New Media Art:
The authors defined New Media Art as projects that use emerging media technologies and are concerned with culture, politics, and aesthetics. In other words, it is the intersection of arts, media, and technologies. In my opinion, New Media Art refers to projects that use emerging technologies to not only translate artworks from other forms into new media but also to realize certain functions and effects that are exclusive to new media and are hard to achieve via “old media”. Nowadays, technologies and concepts have developed for 16 years since the text was published. The hype of VR, AR, and metaverse takes people’s sensorial experience to a new domain and era. However, the accessibility is concerning for the hardware requirements to create and appreciate these kinds of artwork.
Art Historical Antecedents, Themes, Tendencies:
· Before 2000:
http://numeral.com/projects/web/everyIcon/everyIcon.php
Description:
This is Every Icon by John F. Simon Jr. in 1996. It is an icon described by a 32 X 32 grid, which allows any element of the grid to be colored black or white. It would be unstoppable to display all the possible while technically it would cost more than a person’s life to see all the possibilities.
Artist:
John F. Simon Jr. is a new media artist who works with LCD screens and computer programming. He currently lives and works in Warwick, New York. He once said, “My feeling is that an artist’s state of mind when making a work is critical to what the work transmits to the viewer. I have always worked to improve on methods, technique, and materials, but only recently have I found that I can also improve the inner workings; I can develop the mental aspects of my art practice.” I think it pointed out the importance of expression and content in an artwork instead of mechanical techniques.
Context:
John F. Simon Jr. is one of the New Media artists who consciously reflect art history in their works. Every Icon revisits Paul Klee’s experimental use of the Cartesian grid. It is a piece of conceptual art realized in software by showing the potential of canvas. Although it takes only 1.36 years to display all of the variations along the first line, it takes an exponentially longer 5.85 billion years to complete the second line. Even in the limited visual space, there are more images created than humans could perceive. The concept penetrates technology, software coding, and the digital world.
· After 2000:
https://www.aftersherrielevine.com/
Description:
After Sherrie Levine is a new media work created by Michael Mandiberg in 2001. The artist scanned Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of Walker Evans’s classic Depression-era photographs of an Alabama sharecropper family in 1979. Then he posted them on the Web at AfterSherrieLevine.com.
Artist:
Michael Mandiberg is an American artist, programmer, designer and educator. One of his noticeable works is Print Wikipedia, a visualization of how big Wikipedia is, which is a collection of printed-out content with pdfs uploaded online and available for printing.
Context:
This work is an example of how new media artworks feature “appropriation”. In my opinion, it is an extension of existing works. The reproduction, changes in sequence and collage could even influence the audience better than the “original” source. In this case, the photos were appropriated but still conveyed authenticity. The work has a certain “cultured value but little economic value”. This kind of appropriation develops with the progress in New Media Arts, which simulates the intellectual laws and open sources development later.