Origins

New Media concerns are often derived from the telecommunications, mass media and digital modes of delivery the artworks involve, with practices ranging from conceptual to virtual art, performance to installation.

During the 1960s the development of then new technologies of video produced the new media art experiments of Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, and multimedia performances of Fluxus.

At the end of the 1980s the development of computer graphics, combined with real time technologies then in the 1990s with the spreading of the Web and the Internet favored the emerging of new and various forms of interactivity. Important artists include: Lynn Hershman Leeson, David Rokeby, Don Ritter, Perry Hoberman, telematic art Roy Ascott, Internet Vuk Ćosić, Jodi, virtual and immersive art Jeffrey Shaw, Maurice Benayoun and large scale urban installation Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

The Aliens- Charles Bukowski

Themes

Several themes that contemporary new media art addresses include computer art, collaboration, identity, appropriation, open sourcing, telepresence, surveillance, corporate parody, as well as intervention and hacktivism.

In the book Postdigitale, Maurizio Bolognini suggested that new media artists have one common denominator, which is a self-referential relationship with the new technologies, the result of finding oneself inside an epoch-making transformation determined by technological development.

Nevertheless New Media Art does not appear as a set of homogeneous practices, but as a complex field converging around three main elements: 1) the art system, 2) scientific and industrial research, and 3) politico-cultural media activism.

There are significant differences between scientist-artists, activist-artists and technological artists closer to the art system, who not only do have different training and techno-cultures, but also different artistic production.

“This Is Not A Poem” is an interactive flash-based digital work that includes audio, text, and video. It opens with the sound of a tree falling, a seemingly disassociated sound that will develop into a central motif. Once past the title screen, the initial image readers confront is a disk with an inner and outer circle.

The Hugo Ball - by Talan Memmott

Talan Memmott’s The Hugo Ball is an invocation of the poet of the same name, an electronic interpretation of Ball’s poem “Gadji Beri Bimba,” and Memmott’s own proclamation on language in the age of new media. The piece, presented in Flash, greets the viewer with the image of a crystal ball, within which appears the faint form of a human face, against a haunting sonic backdrop. As the viewer moves the mouse over the ball, the face begins to move, reciting the words of Ball’s infamous poem in random order, accompanied by the images of the words themselves as they are spoken.

Hypertext poetry

Hypertext poetry is a form of digital poetry that uses links using hypertext mark-up. It is a very visual form, and is related to hypertext fiction and visual arts.

The links mean that a hypertext poem has no set order, the poem moving or being generated in response to the links that the reader/user chooses.

It can either involve set words, phrases, lines, etc. that are presented in variable order but sit on the page much as traditional poetry does, or it can contain parts of the poem that move and / or mutate.

The earliest examples date to no later than the mid 1980s.

Whiteboard Animation Poem - Major Jackson

Vigilance - by Liu Dao

Vigilance - by Liu Dao

Liu Dao is an electronic art group composed of performance artists, multimedia artists and engineers. As of May 2008, more than 15 artists are associated with the Liu Dao collective. Their work focuses on interactive art installations that explore the effects that “technologies have on our perception and modes of communication”.

Video poetry using graphics: My Love For You Is So Embarassing

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