What Is New Media?
The concept of new media art has been born more than 15 years ago, from the beginning of digital art, mechanical art, and interactive art gradually occurred to expand, including 3D printing art, and real-time interactive art. During the development of new media art, its classification and types have developed towards diversification and strong interactivity.
As the author mentions in the article, since the publication of the article, new media art is moving from an isolated art to a diversified and globalized one. If we look back at ourselves and dig into the apps we use such as TikTok, we will find that these referencing programs are dominating our new media art culture. In contrast to the 1990s when we needed to go through exhibitions to understand this art, now we only need a cell phone screen to view art and interact with it, and the meme that spreads through social media has evolved to become the new media art of the new age and is replicating and optimizing itself.
Art Historical Antecedents, Themes, Tendencies
Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon
Shu Lea Cheang is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker. This work was done between 1998 and 1999 by a number of artists to explore questions about network development and network gender integration.
The title of this work is derived from the rape and murder of a transgender person. The artists deploy Brandon to the web through a collage of images and investigate digital gender and the trial of sexual assault in cyberspace. This clearly reflects the 1999 Internet wave of thinking, where artists began to think about virtual gender and online trials, yet they did not break away from the original framework. In some ways, we can still see the influence of previous Dadaism on them, with their use of the collage form and Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Francis Picabia has a similar effect, using irony and absurdity to immerse the viewer.
Rebirth of a Nation (2002), Paul Miller
Paul Milleraka aka Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid, who is an influential DJ, writer, and artist.
In this work, he fuses new media art and popular music, combining a silent film with racist overtones and quartet improvisation to form a new media work. In this work, we can find some characteristics of the development of new media art. New media art moves toward interdisciplinarity and integration, while not being limited by traditional restrictions, making it somewhat anti-traditional in nature.