New Media: What is it?

Aesthetics Visual Arts
1

I am curious what some people here consider New Media “Art” to truly be. For example, creative works that are interactive, time-based, kinetic, etc can be highly innovative, they involve the need for talent to mediate whatever experience the creator wants to portray, but I am not sure if they fall into the category of “art”. The term new media is unfortunate in its own respect because it lacks the ability to pinpoint exactly what it is trying to describe because media and technology change rapidly and thus what could one day be perceived as new could be obsolete the next.

Since I work in this genre, for lack of better words, I often don’t use the word art when describing what I do. Instead, I often refer to it as just my creative practice. I also believe some of it is actually just architecture or monumental. In order to clarify, here are some creative works I really enjoy:

http://www.well.com/~demarini/exhibitions.htm

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/

http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/

http://www.kodama.hc.uec.ac.jp/project/protrude.html

What sort of need do humans have for new media “art”? Is it really art? Is it a response to our curious nature? Is it invalid? Is it architecture? Is it media or just a mediator?

I believe that certain new media can portray a creator’s sense of life. Much new media is playful yet meticulously engineered and programmed. On the other hand, much of it is not representational, rather, it exists within reality and must be experienced within. Much of it could be argued as being embodied, although that can be argued against easily.

My reaction is that kinetic installations, physical computing, net art, and all of these creative technologies are in fact not art but a different creative practice altogether, or, they are just a combination of art, architecture, design and engineering that are enjoyable because of human curiosity.

Another term for these products is emerging technologies, used often at conventions like SIGGRAPH or CHI.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

2

I think the field has potential, and could well be art. Imagine if you will a fully immersive 3D environment, ala the holodeck on Star Trek. In such an environment you could selectively recreate reality according to your value judgments, and you could create some phenomenally artistic scenes. A lot of what I saw in the links you provided don’t seem to do a great deal with the canvas, so to speak, and I think they could create a much more integrated and immersive effect.

None the less, I think with computer technology we’ll see great immersive art works, complete with animated objects and characters, and they could well be interactive as well.

3

I think the field has potential, and could well be art. Imagine if you will a fully immersive 3D environment, ala the holodeck on Star Trek. In such an environment you could selectively recreate reality according to your value judgments, and you could create some phenomenally artistic scenes. A lot of what I saw in the links you provided don’t seem to do a great deal with the canvas, so to speak, and I think they could create a much more integrated and immersive effect.

None the less, I think with computer technology we’ll see great immersive art works, complete with animated objects and characters, and they could well be interactive as well.

I agree, certainly, that the idea of the holodeck is a fine example of a need for art, especially the certain types of expensive, processor heavy computing that goes into making high-poly virtual reality. Have you ever read Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray? She draws a historical line from the medieval bard to MMORPGs. What makes something immersive or better yet, embodied? Does it have to do with how realistic it represents the natural world or does embodiment occur when the medium is so ubiquitous it isn’t questioned?

I would surely argue that an immersive world can be art such as a painting. I feel they both seek to recreate objective reality selectively, but do so with different tools. My question though regards more the works I posted. I think Protrude Flow is an excellent piece, whether it is art or not. It is fun, innovative and imaginative. I have played with it myself and although I obviously don’t believe in magic, I could easily describe the experience as magical.

So is it just a museum exhibit? Is it just science? Is it just media? Is it just an installation? Would you disregard some of these examples because they are too highly political or they possess too much noise in the rendering process? Are they too abstract? I would say that these qualities are what make them not art but it doesn’t make them invalid. So are they architecture? Are they monuments? Are they fruitless experiments?

For me, the ambiguity doesn’t bother me because I love many types of interactive pieces, video installations, etc. If I ever said to my profs, “hey guess what these actually aren’t really art but thats ok they are just something else” I would get a lot of criticism.

I really hope other people respond as I think about it all the time.