What Is New Media Art? Definition and History of New Media Art

New media art refers to all forms of contemporary art made, altered, or transmitted using new forms of media technology. This includes digital art, interactive art, internet art, and virtual art, as well as works of art made using robotics, video games, biotechnology, 3D printing, and computer animation. New media art is a category that defies static categorization as the form continues to expand and new media technologies are invented and explored by artists.

New media art began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century, as new technologies developed at a rapid pace. In the 1990s, with the development of the internet, there was a sudden proliferation of new media art works and intersections of new media. The internet also provided a platform for new media artists to reach large new audiences that were previously inaccessible.

• Early origins: The invention of moving photographic contraptions such as the praxinoscope and zoetrope in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginning of a new era in the art world.
• View From the Black Room: In 1958, the artist Wolf Vostell included a television set in his View From the Black Room cycle, extending the idea of found object art into the realm of technology. This marked one of the first examples of new technologies being incorporated into established artmaking practices.
• Fluxus: During the 1960s, the Fluxus collective experimented with multimedia work that combined technology with performance art. New media artists such as Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono began their careers in the Fluxus movement.
• Robotics: In the 1960s, artists began to experiment with robotics as a way to create more kinetically dynamic sculptures. One of the first to use this new technology was French artist Jean Tinguely, who, inspired by Fluxus and Dada, incorporated robotics into his self-destroying sculpture Homage to New York (1960).
• The internet: In the 1990s, the advent of computer graphics and the internet expanded the possibilities of new media art even further. Many new media artists used websites, video games, and other forms of digital graphics to produce their work.
• Social media: In the twenty-first century, the proliferation of social media technology has prompted new modes of artists reaching audiences, as well as new ways for artists to critique those technologies. In 2010, performance artist Marina Abramović presented The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, alongside new media artist An Xiao’s The Artist is Kinda Present, which invited gallery-goers to engage with Xiao via text or Tweet.

New media art is a very broad term that encapsulates many kinds of art forms. Some of its defining artistic practices include:

1. 1. Digital technologies: New media art often takes advantage of digital technologies, such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, or virtual reality.
2. 2. Multimedia: A common tactic of new media artists is to combine different types of media in one art piece.
3. 3. Interactivity: Digital media forms, such as virtual reality, social media, and video games, allow viewers to interact with the artwork directly.
4. 4. Digital culture: Many new media artworks engage with digital culture, questioning how we interact online and the way that new media increasingly shapes our everyday lives.

These are some of the world’s most influential new media artists.

1. 1. Nam June Paik: Paik is considered the founder of video art. Born in Seoul, the Korean American artist is famous for his large works built out of many screens, such as Video Flag (1985) and Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995).
2. 2. Vera Frenkel: This Canadian artist uses video, performance, and interactive installation art to create works that focus on global migration. Some of her most important works include … from the Transit Bar (1992) and Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive (2008).
3. 3. Petra Cortright: Cortright is an American artist whose video works have been presented in galleries and on YouTube. Her work experiments with how we present ourselves online, such as her video works VVEBCAM (2007) and Video Catalogue (2011), which showed the value of Cortright’s based on a YouTube algorithm.
4. 4. Jeffrey Shaw: Shaw is a Melbourne-born visual artist who has worked with new media, from cinematic installations to virtualized environments, since the 1960s. Some of his most recognized works include T_Visionarium II (2006), an interactive cinema piece, and mArchive (2014), a 360-degree digital interactive environment cataloguing materials from the Melbourne Museum.
5. 5. Maurice Benayoun: Benayoun was born in Algeria and is based in Paris and Hong Kong. His works have pioneered uses of digital and computer technology and his teachings and lectures have helped establish important concepts in new media art. Some of his works include Occupy Wall Screens (2012), a video work aligning stock prices with emotional maps of Occupy Wall Street sites, and the virtual reality work Colors Tunnel (2013).
6. 6. Alexei Shulgin: Russian artist Alexei Shulgin’s work incorporates digital interactivity and web design. His most notable works include Form Art (1997) and 386DX (1997–present), in which a PC running Windows 3.1 performs live music using MIDI files and a text-to-speech function.
7. 7. Rafaël Rozendaal: Dutch-born Rozendaal creates work specifically for the internet. Inspired by the net.art movement founded in 1994, Rozendaal builds webpages where users can interact with colorful abstractions, such as color flip .com (2008) and fill this up .com (2014).

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