Final Project -- Plain Text Version

Note: unfortunately, this section has broken characters in places and I do not have the time to fix it. My final project submission will have a text file for easier reading to compensate for this document being broken!

What is New Media art?

So, what even is New Media art and visual culture?

New Media art is a broad term typically used to refer to contemporary works of art that utilize and/or engage with emergent technologies of the late 20th - early 21st century. The term was first used in the 60s and 80s-90s to refer to television and personal computer technologies; but with the introduction of Web 2.0, the term is now colloquially used to refer to all “digital media”. It’s often studied in the realm of Media Studies (a broad interdisciplinary field that explores the intersections of computing, science, the humanities, and the visual and performing arts). The works that fall under this category are diverse in both their formal and conceptual approaches, and tend to explore the use or the conceptual weight of recent technologies.

Hey… That kind of sounds like Contemporary Art, just focused on technology…

Right? However, key theorists, scholars, and both artists and viewers of New Media art and visual culture all seem to agree on a shared concept: “There is something about New Media that distinguishes it from other art movements”. Great minds agree on the idea that New Media art isn’t just delineated by being technology-based: the notions of New Media – the way it carries messages, the way individuals engage with this tech, and the way these media in turn shape our society – make us engage with the world differently.

What exactly is so different about these notions and our behavior in relation to New Media, and what kind of art and visual culture these result in? Let us explore!

Hyper Interconnectivity

Hyper interconnectivity is, perhaps, one of those select key elements of New Media art and visual culture that is exclusive to New Media (at least, in this intense quality) due to the historical and unprecedented technological advancements of television and network tech, with special focus on the Internet. The introduction of internetworking systems and programs that allow users from across the globe to almost instantly access and share information resulted in changes not only to the immediate processes of informational exchange, but to visual and social cultures at large.

Cultural elements – music, art, language, customs, practices – can now spread at a higher rate than ever before. Messages can reach a person from half a world away in just a few seconds. This can be both thrilling and immensely concerning; and artists working in the field of New Media often respond to these concerns by exploring the concept and the technology of late 20th-21st century hyperconnectivity (whether that exploration is intentional and targeted, or the functionality of hyperconnective structures and technology facilitates the creation/distribution/meaning making of the work behind the scenes).

Nam June Paik was one of the artists that explored the idea of New Media’s connectivity in works of art; he is specifically known for his works that critically examine the role and technology of television and video as it entered the social life of communities around the world. He was concerned with the light-fast progression of such technology and the human response to this progression:

“The real issue … is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly – too rapidly.”

His famous work Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) explores and amplifies the notions of hyperconnectivity and information exchange with a fifty-one channel video installation – a map of the USA, flattened and interwoven into a patchwork of overwhelming visual and aural information stimuli. The US is represented as a system of information, distinct at each of its final points (states) and yet connected by new networking technology and the progressing cultural exchange facilitated by that technology.

This work can be fun and exciting: the bright and saturated colors of the neon lights, the blinking screens of the TV sets showcasing looping recordings that are associated with each of the states, the vastness and yet the closeness of the work – these all mirror the positive effects that networking technology has on the world – connection, information exchange, diversity.

However, Nam June Paik is critical about the representation of this new tech: interconnectivity also flattens – there's only one video channel for each of the states (who picks the video to be displayed and what tropes does that communicate about the represented state?); and the colorful display of blinking light is as thrilling as it is overwhelming and disarming.

This work, along with many others, recognizes interconnectivity as one of New Media’s key elements and explores the notions of its use and adoption into communities around the world. Interconnectivity is a neutral tool, defined by the arms that wield it – how did it change us and where could it lead us to next?

Transparency, visibility, and open systems

The introduction of networking and information exchange technologies allowed for more people to be globally connected to not just each other, but the information and resources that would previously be site-specific or simply inaccessible to the wider population. This, especially coupled with the desire of the first Internet creators for this technology to be open, accessible, and used for public good, created a virtual environment and connection channels that, through enhanced information exchange, challenged existing power structures and made visible what was previously unseen.

As all technology is, the Internet is a neutral tool – and it can be used by diverse actors, all in pursuit of their own goals. WikiLeaks is a website that was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange to host whistleblower documents, and is the platform of origin for many hidden processes becoming uncovered: war documents, election campaign leaks, internal discriminatory practices of massive corporations. However, the immense amounts of personal data hosted by all Internet users on various websites can also be turned against them – by private or government actors collecting that information, that can be used for various private interests, from targeted ad campaigns to intense and invasive government surveillance.

Many New Media artists respond to these notions of online transparency, heightened visibility, and a desire for open systems in their art practices. Hasan M. Elahi is one of them, and his immense work Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project (2003-ongoing)is a critical and an ironic engagement with the ideas of visibility and surveillance.

Hasan M. Elahi ended up on the FBI watchlist due to his travel history appearing “suspicious”, and was intensely investigated by the agency for many months. As a response to the invasive tactics of the FBI, Elahi decided to reclaim his control on what information is private to him by publicizing his entire existence. He created a website that tracked every detail of his life: constant updates on his location and actions, regular images of him and his surroundings, small details like the food he was eating or the restroom he was visiting. This “self-surveillance” performance lasted for years.

This work responds to the idea of information trails on the Internet and their illusionary privacy and anonymity by making a loud statement: this information won’t ever be private to certain actors, so let it be visible for everyone else; turning the eye of the surveillance back on the system in power by recognizing its presence.

Ironically, this work ended up obstructing Elahi’s visibility. With so many data points, things stop making sense, and the surveilling party must now sort through thousands of diverse data points to find information of interest: when so much is visible, you don’t know where to start looking.

Grassroots organizing and community participation

With increased access to information cultivation and exchange, and with the open source, non-corporate origins of the Internet, a lot of New Media art and cultural projects resonate with the ideas of community participation and grassroots organizing.

With increased access comes increased collaboration, and technologies of near-instantaneous communication allowed for better organizational tools than previously available. Online communities of like-minded people are built and maintained, groups united by a shared goal can spread information and seek allyships, and regular members of a community now have a platform to leave a lasting message – from forum boards and social media comments to organized participation in group events.

In addition to pure technological advancements and the notions of a life with this tech, early Web art is also often interested in the increased ability of an Internet user to make their voice heard and to participate in something larger than an individual-scale project. Jenny Holzer’s early web based work for Ädaweb, Please Change Beliefs (1995), plays around with the idea of easy communal involvement with a set of “truisms” – sayings that feel “true” on an uncritical surface level.

Visitors to the website are invited to read through a list of Holzer’s truisms, and “improve or change” any of them. The new additions are compiled in an ongoing list of community-contributed truisms, which is maintained and publicly accessible to this day despite the work being almost 30 years old.

The simplicity of the project and its focus on community participation creates an opportunity for an individual to both feel like a part of a larger whole, and to also look inwards, examining their own internal beliefs and bias when responding to or altering truisms. What does it mean to leave a short message on a decades-old platform? When that message stays there, unchanged and visible, for years? In what ways do social norms and conventions play out on an anonymous submission form with no moderation?

And if this is one way participation is made possible, what else can be achieved with New Media technology?

Existing culture mixing with technological conventions

What happens when reality-based, embodied experiences enter the virtual sphere? How do social, cultural, systemic structures translate into a technologically-driven community? What changes and what stays in a world with New Media?

In “New Media from Borges to HTML” (The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass, 2003) Lev Manovich explores eight propositions for what New Media is and how to analyze it, with the 4th proposition being: “New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software”. Manovich suggests that the conventions of New Media arise from a “mix … between two different sets of cultural forces, or cultural conventions: on one hand, the conventions of already mature cultural forms (such as a page, a rectangular frame, a mobile point of view) and, on the other hand, the conventions of computer software and, in particular, of HCI, as they have developed until now” (18).

The introduction of new and quickly developing technologies in many ways uprooted existing structures and forced actors in the present world to adapt to a reality with enhanced possibilities. Cultures not only mix with each other, now that the world is connected with Internet capabilities – the culture of existing communities is mixed with technological conventions of the tools, resulting in a new and intermixed third visual and social culture.

Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) is an example of early web art that stems from an amalgamation of existing art and cultural media conventions and the conventions of the technologically-based New Media: hypertext mirroring collage.

This work is a simple interactive website telling an obscured narrative of a couple dealing with the boyfriend’s return from war. Clicking through the pages, the story unfolds and fragments, both narratively and visually: the more the viewer explores the page, the more the page starts to fragment, mirroring the destabilization, confusion, and vulnerability of the couple’s relationship after the war. This work, simple in its formal elements, is a great example of artists exploring the limits of early hypertext-based works and its creative application.

However, this approach to narrative-telling and art-making is not new. George P. Landow suggests the existence of strong parallels between hypertext HTML-based works (not just of art) and collage practices of Contemporary Artists in his essay “Hypertext as Collage Writing'': hypertext as a collage-writing medium, one that isn’t the same as collage or montage, but that is using a lot of similar principles to achieve similar effects.

The conventions of “juxtaposition, appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, blurring limits, edges, borders, blurring distinctions between border and ground” (158), present first in analogue collage works of artists like Hannah Hoch, are now mirrored in the use of hypertext – literal links creating connections between pieces of information in a “multisequential or multilinear” manner, with the “linking [creating] new kinds of connectivity and reader choice” (154).

Manovich argues that it is the disconnect between the potential full implementation and the actual partial implementation (“uneven development”) of New Media technologies that creates a new “amalgamation” of existing culture and conventions of software and data (18). What new kinds of hybrids of interaction will this result in? What stays and what changes when the world becomes digitally extended?

Concerns and aesthetics of early stages of new technology

Lev Manovich explores eight propositions for what New Media is in his essay “New Media from Borges to HTML” (The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass, 2003). One of these critical ways to analyze New Media art and visual culture is suggestion 5: “New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology” (19).

Every media – from paint to printing to digital technology – was new once, and as history shows, similar questions and concerns appear every time such new media are introduced. Regardless of whether New Media specifically is unique in its effects on the global world or if it’s just one of the ever evolving media, these echoed concepts and questions are a key feature of artists critically engaging with New Media technologies.

Nam June Paik was one such artist that is well known for critical exploration of emerging technologies and their role in and the effect on humans and communities. His work TV Buddha (1974) is a response to a “too rapidly” progressing adoption of television technologies: Nam June Paik’s concerns mirrored those that tend to appear with the introduction of new media into society, but were amplified by a fast-paced wide spreading of this tech, without due critical thought on how to mindfully engage with it.

In TV Buddha, a statue of Buddha sits in front of a TV set with a closed circuit monitor: the image of Buddha is recorded in real time and translated to the screen, which in turn appears in front of Buddha, completing the circuit. This work comments on and invites the viewer to reflect on multiple concerns regarding TVs: ideas of passive viewing, with an unmoving “frozen” Buddha being unable to look away; seeing oneself in media on screen, notions of both the love of self-viewing and newfound visibility; the closed circuit mirroring an unbroken cycle of uncritical engagement with new tech.

Static and unmoving yet constantly live and changing, this work is a great example of New Media artists engaging with the concerns and aesthetics of early stages of new technology. But how different is New Media from other technologies? Is it just a new media?

What is so different about New Media?

One more key element of New Media art and visual culture is the huge and, perhaps, not fully answerable question:

What is so different about New Media that makes it a distinct artistic and cultural category?

While not often raised directly by artworks themselves, this question permeates the entire field of New Media and is a point of critical discussion of Media Studies and many scholars. New Media as a field is quite similar to Contemporary Art: they both operate in roughly the same time frame, the latter usually agreed to be directly preceding the former; both raise questions of the definitions of art and attempt to blur boundaries between art and non-art; both tend to often be in direct response to current global events or issues; both are often largely conceptual in nature. What is it that makes us define New Media as separate from Contemporary Art?

Marshall McLuhan, known as the “father of media studies", is famous for the saying: “The medium is the message”. This, perhaps, is the one key lens through which we can propose the unique significance of New Media as a separate movement and field of study. McLuhan argues in his essay The Medium Is the Message that “...the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (203). It is not the content of the work that is transformative to the larger structures, but the medium of the work itself that drives change: a new medium allows for new possibilities, these possibilities allow people to interact with the world in a substantially different way, and the resulting change in the wider cultural systems result in both large-scale change and the demand for the development of current and future new media.

This theory suggests that despite the numerous parallels (which sometimes are not even parallel and are just purely identical) between New Media and Contemporary Art, the effect of the digital media greatly outweighs any conceptual significance of individual works. The media of television, Internet, digital photography and photo editing, artificial intelligence, video games, social media, computer applications – all these create a qualitatively different experience for the user and become “extensions of man”, allowing for greater abilities that in turn shape how humans interact with each other, the wider systems, and the medium itself. The proposed key elements of hyper interconnectivity, transparency and visibility, community participation and grassroots organizing, existing culture mixing with conventions of technology, and the aesthetics of early stages of new technology all arise (or become qualitatively different from their previous historical iterations) through the effect of new digital media.

Perhaps this is the definitive answer to the question of “what makes New Media so different”. Perhaps a few decades will pass, even more incomprehensibly impactful technology will arise, and what we now consider to be groundbreaking will be nothing more than the beginning of the introduction of humankind to a new technologically-driven era. I don’t believe this question will be answered soon, as not enough distance has been placed between the present day scholars and the temporal period of what is considered New Media art and visual culture (and, perhaps, Contemporary Art is just as fresh and will have to be reevaluated too).

However, whatever the future may bring, there is a shared feeling among many – scholars, artists, and viewers alike – that there is something important about this, some quality of the New Media experience that makes the present day feel so unlike anything the history has seen before.