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10 theses

1. A museum of new media art can exist online, in a physical gallery space, or both.

2. A museum of new media art contains works that actively engage in new technology, or works that engage old technology in new ways.

3. A museum of new media art contains works that reflect the culture and lifestyle of a technologically-influenced society.

4. While much of the information on the web can be considered worthless, such as spam emails, or even harmful, such as computer viruses, everything currently on the internet is a viable candidate for a new media musuem's recognition.

5. Everything currently in the public sphere can be part of a new media art display.

6. A museum of new media art does not need to simply be a gallery, with information and images. It could be a forum, a chatroom, or any other way in which new media artwork can be seen, heard, or engaged with.

7. A museum of new media art does not necessarily require curators who decide what is on display. For some museums, any who are interested can decide what it contains.

8. New media is spontaneous, and some museums of new media art are only temporary. New media art quickly comes and goes, and is then forgotten.

9. No museum of new media art is required to follow established conventions of art display. Each museum of new media art can be a unique experiment.

10. A musuem of new media art can be considered a new media artwork in its own right.

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"YouTube Poop: Mario and Luigi look for spaghetti." - rockthelauren, posted Sep 29, 2007

This video work, uploaded to youtube, is a prototypical example of the genre of video art known as "Youtube Poop." or "YTP". Echoing the works of Dara Birnbaum and other found footage video artists, the video makes use of animation footage from the 1994 CD-i console video game Hotel Mario. The video takes the original images and sounds from Hotel Mario and manipulates them, cutting, pasting, resequencing and filtering the original, subverting the narrative intention of the video game's animated sequences to create an entirely new, highly nonsensical, and rather abrasive work.

But whereas an artist like Birnbaum used similar techniques to demonstrate clearly definible commentary on subjects such as feminism, videos of this genre seem to instead eschew such purposeful concepts, embracing instead ideas of chaos, irrationalism, discord, and the like, very reminiscent of films made by the Dadaists in the early parts of the 20th century, transported into the 21st century and reimagined through new media technology.

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The Carl Comics - Scott McCloud

This work, a conceptual webcomic piece created between 1998 and 2001, comes in two parts. The first of these, found by the link on the left "nose" of the faces above, leads to a comic adapted and expanded from Scott McCloud's 1993 book on sequential art theory, "Understanding Comics". The comic sequence narrates the events of a man who dies in a drunken car accident. However, the narrative is not straightforward at all, and is told in a nonlinear method, with all 51 of the comic's frames appearing out of narrative sequence as the viewer clicks on the face of Carl to see the next frame, revealing information to the viewer without context to understand it, providing resolutions to problems without revealing their conflicts, and so forth.

The second part of the piece is a link found on the right "nose" of the colored faces. This section leads to part of an interactive narrative, where users of the artist's website were encouraged to send in multiple suggestions for comic frames, which were then compiled and added to the comic's website in a branching format, leading to bizarre, nonlinear narrative sequences. The panels also provide links with a record of the user discussion used to create the comic frames, providing insight into the creation of this strange comic.

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"GFP Bunny" - Eduardo Kac

Part photoshop, part collaborative, part sculpture, part performance work, part biomedical engineering, part international politics, GFP Bunny is an all-encompassing piece of new media art. Originally envisioned in 2000 by the artist as a biologically engineered bioluminescent rabbit that he would take home with him and interact with as a performance work, Alba the GFP Bunny turned into something else completely when the scientist who created the rabbit's genetics refused to let it outside of the laboratory it was born in.

There is still some debate as to whether the scientist and Kac ever actually agreed for the rabbit to leave the French laboratory, it is clear that the artist used the sensationalism and media attention of the situation to overhaul his original concept into a whole new area of work. Demanding custody of the rabbit, Kac launched into a new campaign of drawings, posters, protests, user-submitted artwork, demonstrations, sculpture, and so forth, a refocusing that would dominate his practice as an artist for the next decade up until the present, all revolving around the little rabbit that would be green.

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"Viral Vacuum" - wendyvainity

Posted on Nov 13, 2010, the video is a work created in the 3D modelling and animation program Carrara 7. The work features a 3D model of a dancing woman with a vacuum and a cat in a field of grass. The cat and the woman feature somewhat advanced particle physics in the rendering of their voluminous and moving hair, but otherwise the quality of the 3D rendering is quite poor, lacking advanced shadows and light sources, and having very low texture quality. As an aside, the artist of the animation did not create the 3D models used in the video work, they were downloaded from the original modellers via the internet and used in the creation of this animation, a wholly new digital form of the concept of using found objects in art making.

The work, as a whole, is rather surreal and nonsensical. It features very little in the way of a narrative, if it contains one at all. The woman dances with a vacuum, a cat grows and flies around, entering and exiting a large transparent jar of some kind, and an elephant moves by. Letters drop from the sky, and then the video repeats the beginning again. On top of the visuals, a computer generated voice sings the words "viral vacuum" over and over again, perhaps giving the visual segment of the video some kind of context, or perhaps not.

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Spectators

As early as Plato, philosophers have argued that the act of merely spectating something takes away knowledge and action from the spectator, replacing it with a passive acceptence of the spectacle. This is a standpoint that Jacques Rancière seeks to refute in The Emancipated Spectator. Rancière claims that, "the performance itself… stands as a “spectacle” between the artist's idea and the spectator’s feeling and interpretation. This spectacle is a third thing, to which both parts can refer but which prevents any kind of “equal” or “undistorted” transmission." (Rancière, 278). In other words, in a work such as theater, the performers and the audience spectating both play an equal and active role in the performative work. The performers perform their part, and the spectators spectate, and with each of them acting in their own way, they experience and interpret the performative spectacle in their own individual ways. This idea is very similiar to other ideas in post-modern art theory, where the "art" in an artwork such as a painting exists not in the mind of the painter, nor the physical object of the painting itself, but instead, in the experience and reaction that is felt between the piece and someone viewing it.

In terms of experiences, Jaron Lanier seems to be displeased with his, and has reacted negatively to recent works. In The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness, Lanier speaks at length about his disdain for the way that technology and the society that surrounds it has progressed over the decades since the internet became a reality. Calling everything created since then flat, expressionless, and bland, he argues that there has been no real change or innovation. "There’s a rule of thumb you can count on in each succeeding version of the web 2.0 movement: the more radical an online social experiment is claimed to be, the more conservative, nostalgic, and familiar the result will actually be." (Lanier, 3) Everything "new" and exciting has merely been cautious remixes and conservative remakes of things from the past. Wikipedia, far from being a great innovation of crowd sourced information, is, according to Lanier, just an encylopedia, something that has been around for centuries. Whereas in the past, music trends changed rapidly over the course of years, music from the past two decades is indistinguishable from each other, and the open source movement in programming has produced absolutely nothing of any real note in the past 30 odd years.

Michel Foucault also discusses the power of the spectator, in a very different manner than expressed by Rancière. He claims simply, "visibility is a trap." (Foucault, 4) Discussing panopticism, by way of the Panopticon, a building designed by Jeremy Bertham in the late 18th century, Foucault explains systems of control and surveyence that can be used in any institution, be it a school, a hospital, but far more tellingly, a prison. Through a simple work of architecture, a tower can be constructed in the middle of a ring of individualized and isolated cells. The people in the cells can always be observed by someone in the tower. But, the tower is constructed so that a person in the tower is not visible to the people in the cells. The idea is that the constant, visible presence of the tower instills a clear power relationship between the observor and the people being observed. The people in the cells have no power to keep themselves from being observed. Whether they are observed or not is up to the whims of the observor. The observor in the tower, on the other hand, has complete insolation and security. He knows he can not be observed. This unsettling relationship forces the observed to be on their best behavior at all times, unknowing of whether or not they are actually being observed by someone at all. Rather than being passive and powerless, here, the spectator holds all the power.

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Manifesto

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Manovich's Propositions

  In 1967, Charles Csuri created "Hummingbird," an animation showing a drawing of a bird decomposing into little segments and recompiling back into the original drawing, made using computer technology. Using microfilm, this computer animation was then recorded directly onto film, creating a 10 minute long animated film, and purchased by the New York Museum of Modern Art.

However, was this early example of computer generated art, one of the first of its kind, actually an example of new media art? In "New Media from Borges to HTML," Lev Manovich has "Eight Propositions" to examine and define what constitutes new media art. The second of these propositions claims that "new media are the cultural objects which use digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition." Manovich explains that traditional forms of media that existed before "new media," such as radio, television, and film, are to be excluded from this narrow classification. As traditional film is not a digital computer technology, a strict reading of this would lead one to the conclusion that "Hummingbird" is not an example of new media art, depending on its distribution method.

This reading of Manovich's definitions seems very troublesome. If a certain technology is used in a particular way but not in another, a work can fluctuate between being considered new media or not new media art? What about other art forms, such as systems art, which Charlie Gere includes in his discussion of new media art, a broad category of artworks which can include generative and cybernetic-inspired art but also the minimalist paintings of Frank Stella or kinetic sculptures of Lyman Whitaker, art that can certainly be considered "new" in terms of the history of art, and "media" in strict definitions, but not necessarily "new media art" depending on how it was exhibited/distributed/etc? Or what about the art of the New Tendency movement, which featured works inspired by the proximity of the computers of the time? Even though the art of this movement often made use of traditional art media for the final product, was it not new media art, too?

Manovich ends his explanation of this proposition by backing away from it, detailing some of the problems that he himself saw with his definition. This too is problematic, as it further raises the question of whether Manovich's propositions are valid at all. If, under any kind of scrutiny, the example proposition seems too narrow to apply to many forms of what should probably be considered new media art, and the author of the proposition himself sees problems with it, then what use is the proposition for actually explaining and defining anything about new media art?

Far more useful, I think, in defining and understanding art in the world of new media, is the internet and the availability of information through the simple but innovative hyperlink. Hyperlinks can provide a valuble affordance to sifting through and reaching a deeper understanding of information, such as the examples of the hyperlinked Manovich and Gere articles, which led to myself learning about various movements in art history which I otherwise would not know anything about.

Gere claims that, "Art made by using and reflecting upon new media and new technologies helps us understand how our lives are being transformed by these very media and technologies. The gallery has an important role to play in making this art visible, not just now but also in the future, when such work will be part of art history." Advances in technology, such as the affordances provided by the internet, will definitely increase the availability of information about each piece in a gallery, as well as the gallery as a whole, and how it relates to previous works of art, etc, potentially increasing the appreciation and knowledge that participants can derive from the gallery. In addition, the technology reflected upon and being used in galleries today will in fact be a marker to inform the students of culture and art history in the future, who will be able to determine what the past was like and how things have changed, by studying how we interacted with the world in our present.

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This book, published in 1871, has a long history and has been in many schools and libraries, as evidenced by the many signs of ownership stuck on this page on top of each other.

From the third page of A Text-book of Pathological Histology. Does not include metadata indicating library of origination or date of digitization.

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Marisa Olson

Marisa Olson is a multimedia artist, critic, and curator. Much of her work is focused on geopolitical and environmental concerns, as can be seen in several selections of her work.

One of these, entitled "Assisted Living," was a performance piece done in 2009. In this work, Olson dressed in a costume and pretended to be a futuristic show host, presenting a program ala Martha Stewart to the 100-plus-year olds of the future. This work raises questions regarding the realities of a future where the average human's life expectancy will increase, prompting one to consider what to do with all of those extra people in all of those extra years.

In another work, titled "Time Capsules," Olson took casette tapes and other pieces of discarded technological garbage, painted them gold, and put them on display. In many case, such as with the casette tapes in the image, they were displayed not at all dissimilarly to a garbage landfill, calling to attention the vast number many old pieces of technology that have become worthless due to the progression of technology, and now fill our growing landfills.

Olson's adventures as a contestant on the reality TV show American Idol was the focus of another one of her works. In this performative piece, Olson used the format of the program to expose the audience's ability to affect change through elective processes, and urged them to put that power to constructive use.

http://www.marisaolson.com/

http://blog.art21.org/2009/12/29/inhale-exhale-whew/

http://americanidolauditiontraining.blogs.com/marisa/