New Media Art Research Articles

EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATIONS IN INDIA: AN EMERGING NEW MEDIA ART FORM

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have always been inquisitive about ways to uniquely express their sides of stories. Traditional Art forms like drawing, painting, sculpting, literature, music, and many others have helped to make it possible. More unconventional new art possibilities have emerged with the introduction of new technologies and industrial revolutions. Motion Pictures and Animation are the two most fascinating forms of artistic expression in these areas.Often, animation is considered a fascinating medium of entertainment for kids and the younger generation. However, many artists have demonstrated that it also has enormous potential to articulate and express life experiences and their minds creatively. As Walt Disney rightly said Animation can explain whatever the mind of men can conceive Thomas (1912-2004). It can take you as far as human imagination can go.This paper delves into how animation has been used as an alternative medium in contemporary New Media Art practices in India. It explores the potential of animation as a medium for creative expression and representation of complex ideas, and how it reflects changes in society brought about by technological advancements. The paper examines the approaches and experiments of Indian contemporary artists, such as Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, and Vivan Sundaram, who have used animation to break free from the confines of traditional mediums and push the boundaries of visual storytelling through technology-based art.

SDGs in new-media arts for science: How do new-media arts promote biotech as means for sustainable development?: How do new-media arts promote biotech as means for sustainable development?

New media arts take inspiration and tools from new technologies and scientific research. In turn, they have great potential for communication of science and its role for sustainability.

New-media arts–based public engagement projects could reshape the future of the generative biology

Research in the sciences of new-media arts aims to develop original research questions and borrows many different interdisciplinary research methodologies that often involve collaboration with professionals from non-art fields to...

Machine-Assisted Learning in Highly-Interdisciplinary Media Fields: A Multimedia Guide on Modern Art

Art and technology have always been very tightly intertwined, presenting strong influences on each other. On the other hand, technological evolution led to today’s digital media landscape, elaborating mediated communication tools, thus providing new creative means of expression (i.e., new-media art). Rich-media interaction can expedite the whole process into an augmented schooling experience though art cannot be easily enclosed in classical teaching procedures. The current work focuses on the deployment of a modern-art web-guide, aiming at enhancing traditional approaches with machine-assisted blended-learning. In this perspective, “machine” has a two-folded goal: to offer highly-interdisciplinary multimedia services for both in-class demonstration and self-training support, and to crowdsource users’ feedback, as to train artificial intelligence systems on painting movements semantics. The paper presents the implementation of the “Istoriart” website through the main phases of Analysis, Design, Development, and Evaluation, while also answering typical questions regarding its impact on the targeted audience. Hence, elaborating on this constructive case study, initial hypotheses on the multidisciplinary usefulness, and contribution of the new digital services are put into test and verified.

Valuing Transience in Contemporary African Art: Economic Viability and Challenges of New Media in South Africa

Looking at artists stemming from South African cities—as well as examples from other parts of the continent—this article examines the economic viability of new-media art in the realm of contemporary African art production. There has been a noted shift from objecthood to video and digital installation and transient forms of art among artists in both early and later stages of their careers in South Africa and beyond. While the economic viability of new-media art is questionable, especially in various localities across the continent, many contemporary African artists engage with this as their medium of choice. Focusing on major as well as peripheral urban economies in Africa, this article explores how recent generations of South African artists and their contemporaries from other parts of the continent are taking on a medium with fraught economic value within the context of the global art market.

Art, Science and Experiment

Some novel concepts have invaded the arts: ideas of art as experiment, and associated understandings of art as research or research-creation conducted under laboratory conditions, and, beyond that, an idea of a hybrid art-science. It is as if art and science, two fields long regarded as distinct, and even polar opposites, are fusing into one. It is hard not to see politics at work in this. In the pursuit of academic standing, art allies itself with the field with the most prestige and funding, science. Conversely, the sciences, always in danger of social disconnection, try to plug themselves into the everyday world through art. I am not concerned here with politics, but I want to explore some of the ways in which art, science and experiment actually engage with one another. We can start by recognizing that ‘experiment’ has at least two meanings. In science, it often has the narrow and precise sense of determining some well defined parameter. I am not exactly sure what the acceleration due to gravity in Exeter is, so I set up the appropriate apparatus, do an experiment and measure it. Scientific experimentation is also often associated with hypothesis-testing. Theory X predicts the value of some parameter to be x, theory Y predicts y. We do an experiment, the value turns out to be y; theory X is falsified, theory Y confirmed. But at the other extreme from these examples, one can find another, much more open-ended and exploratory sense of ‘experiment’: experimentation as brute finding out. Try and see; what happens if . . .? In the history of physics, one could think about attempts to cool matter down closer and closer to absolute zero. It just turned out that some substances lose all electrical resistance and become superconducting when very cold. I cannot think of any artwork that conform to the narrow hypothesistesting sense of experiment. But much contemporary art belongs to the finding-out mode, and that is what I want to focus on here. The phrase ‘new media’ comes to mind. New-media art began and to some extent continues to be experimental in the sense of plunging into the unknown and finding out what can be achieved using, say, digital media instead of paints and brushes. Circuit-bending would be a striking example of this impulse, randomly reconfiguring electronic circuits to find out what sorts of sounds they can generate.1 And this is one way in which art and science/engineering are productively engaged. The artist Simon Penny (2008) has written about a historical genealogy of artist-inventors, in which artists have been central to important technological developments. This aspect of art as research-creation goes back at least to Leonardo da Vinci, but became more systematic with, say, the development of computer-art from the 1960s onwards (Reichardt 1971a, b). Though the connection to engineering is more evident here, science can also be important. Advanced microbiological techniques are crucial to bio-art, for example.2 The works of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand take off from esoteric physical effects like the implosion of bubbles induced by high-frequency sound (http://www.portablepalace.com). In works like these, science and engineering figure as a substrate for artworks that may (or may not) spark more developments in the former. This is the sense of art as a productive detour away from and possibly back to techno-science; techno-science as a surface of emergence and return, in Foucault’s (1972) sense, for art.3 But relations between art and science are often more interesting and oblique than simple mutual support. In their studies of science/art interdisciplinarity, Georgina Born, Andrew Barry and Gisa Weszkalnys (2008) documented important frictions around methods and goals between artists and engineers collaborating in

Interactive multimedia installation art development using recycled input and sensing devices

Contemporary interactive art-technology projects often employ diversified and complex sensing mechanisms. As sensor integration introduces increased hardware cost, engineering and time constraints, artists are either forced to limit the intended project's functionality, increase its budget or allow more time for development. This work introduces the recycled sensor replacement (RSR) approach, designed to enable the use of alternative sensing mechanisms that conform to the original system input-specification demands. In other words, sensors sourced from various devices may be reprogrammed and reused within new interactive projects. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated via practical application over a number of interactive new-media art case studies presenting scenarios of varying complexity. Clearly, artists are presented with a novel sensor-development approach that offers design flexibility and cost reduction.

Arte Contemporânea e Novas Mídias: Partilha Digital ou Discurso Híbrido?

A arte digital e suas características híbridas embasam debates no desenvolvimento econômico e cultural, internacionalmente, e este artigo tem como objetivo discutir tal contexto enquanto uma pesquisa transdisciplinar colaborativa nas intersecções entre arte, ciência e tecnologia. Novos meios de comunicação expandem as possibilidades na arte, reveem suas aplicações estéticas e implicações sociais no campo da ciência e da tecnologia. A relação entre arte eletrônica e a produção mainstream ocupa artistas, curadores e teóricos há muitas décadas, assim como coloca suas práticas dentro dos contextos teóricos e de exposição do mercado de arte contemporânea, para além do desenvolvimento de sua própria linguagem teórica e dos contextos institucionais. Este texto trata do modo como se entende a relação entre o mundo da arte contemporânea, o qual na década de 2000 e 2010 consolidou mais do que nunca uma concorrência acirrada, e a arte digital, a qual alcançou um nível de autonomia e autogestão sem precedentes. Este relacionamento traz discussões sobre o valor de mercado, a autoria, o pluralismo e os atritos internos.Tradução de Giovanna Casimiro.

Sketches for the theory of new media

The text 'Sketches for the theory of new media' suggests open problems for eclectic discussion of new media in the field of contemporary aesthetics and art theory; it indicates the status of new media artwork and the replacement of the concept of artwork by artistic apparatus. More precisely, 'new media' denotes different artistic practices that are based on innovative working with artistic or extra-artistic media. 'New-media artistic practice' denotes introducing non-standard media into a standardized and customarily closed art discipline. For instance, new media may signify introducing photography, film or video into the respective contexts of painting, sculpture or music. 'New media' also denotes experimental investigations of the relations between various traditional and new media within traditionally defined mono-medium practices. Therefore, 'new media' likewise denotes all those intermedia and hybrid art practices that emerge in combinations of different kinds of media (the mixed media, multimedia, poly-media, extended media, art and technology, computer art, cyber art, tactical media, etc). Whereas the hybridization of media was important for the 1950s and '60s neo-avant-garde practices, it was introduced into art education only in the seventies. 'New media' denotes precisely those art practices that are based on artwork-programming (computer art, digital art, cyber art). In parallel with 'new media', one may also use the term 'meta-media', as defined by Lev Manovich. Meta-media is identified with computer multimedia and digital communication networks. The new-media art is no longer interested in observing and presenting the outer world in a new way but in finding new ways to approach and use data previously accumulated in the media. Meta-media art and culture are based on the digital computer as a technology vital for processing, representing or simulating information, which means imitating and positing the sensory effects of all other media.

Object Intermediaries: How New Media Artists Translate the Language of Things

This paper uses Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation between people and things as a focal point for analysis of the work of contemporary new-media artists Paula Gaetano Adi and Lindsey French, who utilize robotics and interactive technology to explore interspecies communication. Framed by materialist, poststructuralist, and posthumanist theory, along with recent discourse in object-oriented ontology, this paper poses the work of Gaetano Adi and French as potential models for visualizing object-oriented and vital materialist interactions. In the age of the Anthropocene, thinking beyond the human has become increasingly vital in both ethical and ecological terms, making the ability to envision less anthropocentric, more object-oriented worldviews both novel and timely.

Hybrid culture: Japanese media arts in dialogue with the West

An exploration of the tensions between East and West and digital and analog in Japanese new-media art. This book grew out of Yvonne Spielmann's 2005-2006 and 2009 visits to Japan, where she explored the technological and aesthetic origins of Japanese new-media art-which was known for pioneering interactive and virtual media applications in the 1990s. Spielmann discovered an essential hybridity in Japan's media culture: an internal hybridity, a mixture of digital-analog connections together with a non-Western development of modernity separate from but not immune to Western media aesthetics; and external hybridity, produced by the international, transcultural travel of aesthetic concepts. Spielmann describes the innovative technology context in Japan, in which developers, engineers, and artists collaborate, and traces the Japanese fondness for precision and functionality to the poetics of unobtrusiveness and detail. She examines work by artists including Masaki Fujihata, whose art is both formally and thematically hybrid; Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, who build special devices for a new sense of human-machine interaction; Toshio Iwai, who connects traditional media forms with computing; and Tatsuo Miyajima, who anchors his LED artwork in Buddhist philosophy. Spielmann views hybridity as a positive aesthetic value-perhaps the defining aesthetic of a global culture. Hybridity offers a conceptual approach for considering the ambivalent linkages of contradictory elements; its dynamic and fluid characteristics are neither conclusive nor categorical but are meant to stimulate fusions.

New-media art and the renewal of the cinematic imaginary

New-media art and the renewal of the cinematic imaginary

The social properties of media arts in an open source era

‘Six Degrees of Separation’ is analogous to what we have come to know as the origins of the ‘social network’ (social network service, social network software or SNS). In our time, the application of the ‘social network’ has become a common mode of living shared ubiquitously by different societies, cultures and communities. With the popularity of open source technology, the creation of social networks is no longer the exclusive domain of professional computer programmers. In China, social networking has also become the new focus of new media artists, who are extremely sensitive to materials and creative media. The current article bases its analysis on the collaboration between American artist Max Kazemzadeh and the Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Beijing in the exhibition of Max’s interactive work ‘Wishing Well’ in China, trying to showcase the intriguing interaction between the social network service, human beings and Chinese society, and inviting the reader to re-examine the role and duties of an artist in our time.

Chess

Chess is a collaborative public new-media art project completed in 2008 with the participation of over 70 people in Hell's Kitchen, New York City.

New media in the white cube and beyond: curatorial models for digital art

This provocative, cutting-edge anthology addresses the challenges of curating, presenting, and preserving new-media art--artworks that use digital technologies as media and emphasize process over object. As an art form that is inherently time based, dynamic, interactive, collaborative, customizable, and variable, new-media art resists objectification. It boldly challenges the traditional art world's customary methods of presentation and documentation as well as its approach to collection and preservation. Edited and introduced by Christiane Paul and featuring contributions by prominent practitioners--institutional and independent curators, theorists, and conservators--this volume charts developments in an exciting field and addresses the conceptual, philosophical, and practical issues of both curating and presenting new-media art.

Place and Time in Digital Landscapes: Critical Jewish Resonance in Contemporary Israeli New-Media Art

Modern art traditionally tends to deal with the question of place in the theme of landscape taken from life. On one hand, the meaning of place is a result of seeing nature as the other of culture (thus lending nature meaning by opposing it to industrial culture), and on the other, place acquires meaning as an object existing within culture. In modernity, following the Romantic depictions of landscape in the early nineteenth century, landscape was reborn as a painterly, social agenda by the Impressionists, but the roots of landscape painting are of course much earlier. The Impressionist place is a space shared by the painter with the social mileu in which he lives; this place includes urban life as well as poppy fields in nature in the most primary sense (allegedly with no allegorical or symbolic meanings). Into the twentieth century, painting continued to present landscapes according to the understanding whereby the artist, and the place represented, gradually emerge on the canvas in continuity with each other. These paintings report on the place from within: the artist paints the place and he is part of it. As I discuss below, the new, digital media art as well as new painting done in the digital age operates from within a different paradigm, in which the account of what is seen, the representation of place, the discovery of its topography (whether using digital or other tools), occurs outside of the place.1 Landscape has become a prevalent theme in contemporary Israeli newmedia art. Landscapes appear at times to resemble a molecular map of digital particles, or a picture of energetic mass, unfolded in space. These imaginary landscapes do not present a picture of a concrete space, there is no identifiable mountain or familiar sight from the countryside, and it sometimes seems as though the works have been deliberately emptied of any recognizable images and loaded with microbial, digital traces that are difficult to interpret. Digital works of art amplify concepts of time, space, color and movement, and harness them to an enticing but at the same time off-putting technological dazzle. The questions we should answer are to do with the meaning of landscape in these works of art, and the coordinates by which we are to read them. Journal of Jewish Identities 2009, 2(2)

Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Mitchell Whitelaw. (2004, MIT Press.) 281 pages.

Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Mitchell Whitelaw. (2004, MIT Press.) 281 pages. For millennia artists have been actively involved in a collective endeavor to produce autonomous artifacts. Evidence for this exists back to the very earliest examples of human artistic expression. Archaeology has shown us a stream of representations of organisms in rock art and sculpture stretching tens of thousands of years into prehistory. From clay, ochre, and paint to hydraulics, mechanics, and clockwork automata, from electricity harnessed in robots to the abstract realm of computation, humans have represented organisms according to the philosophy and technology of their time. Artificial life is a current stage in our fascination with the characteristics that distinguish life from nonlife. The title of Mitchell Whitelaw’s book, Metacreation, refers to this desire of scientists and artists alike to construct generative systems that exhibit an autonomous, creative spark of their own. Autonomy, particularly when it is expressed as an ability to creatively solve problems, is a notable trait of organisms. Arguably the highest expression of this trait is the human ability to produce and interpret games, art, and literature. It is therefore not surprising that previous examples of artificial life, such as Kempelen’s chess player and Jacquet-Droz’s writing automaton, should have arisen when technology facilitated their construction. In the current era, we often think more abstractly than did our forebears. When combined with a symbol-manipulating behemoth like a modern computer, mathematics and computation provide us with the means to realize our abstractions in concrete form and thereby assess their implications. Our philosophy and engineering reflect this abstract thinking in artificial life as they do in many other disciplines. How have artists used these tools and abstractions to realize the latest computational automata? Whitelaw explores their answers, those of the theorists who have commented on their work and the thoughts of the researchers with whom they frequently cooperate. Metacreation is primarily a selected survey of contemporary new-media artificial life artists and their works. What exactly is an artificial life artist? A passable list includes anyone who has been influenced by recent artificial life research and who has adapted it to meet their own creative needs. In his text, Whitelaw focuses specifically on visual artists, leaving aside sonic art and music composition. An important element of the book is the commentary offered by Whitelaw and various theorists he cites on artificial life art. To my knowledge this is the first text to treat artificial life art specifically. The serious consideration of artificial life art and the comparison of its practitioners’ ideas sets Metacreation apart from the many texts that examine new-media art, and the few that treat only the artificial life research community. The survey successfully draws together a number of artists’ ideas that have, until now, been available only in the form of individual monographs and occasional chapters of edited books, journals, and conference proceedings. Metacreation begins with a general introduction to artificial life and the new-media art that it has inspired. It touches briefly on the precursors to artificial life art, in particular linking current thinking with the ideas expressed in the literature on art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, more recently, with the cybernetic art of the 1950s and 1960s. Manifest from Whitelaw’s investigation is the identification of artificial life as the latest phase in a long-running, collective, and creative endeavor to construct autonomous machines. That art has always been central to this endeavor, and that it continues to play an important role, is an implicit thesis of the author and a common theme among the theorists he cites.

Compasses, Meetings and Maps: Three Recent Media Works

The article explores possible cultural approaches to new-media art aesthetics and criticism through an in-depth appraisal of recent works by three contemporary practitioners from Asia and the Pacific: Lisa Reihana, Vernon Ah Kee and Qiu Zhijie. Particular attention is paid to the issues of place, location and cultural practice in their work, issues currently under-examined in new-media art discourse. The analysis pays close attention to the operationality of the works, the influence of pre-digital aesthetic histories and the richly locative and virtual schemas of indigenous epistemologies that serve to meaningfully expand Euro-American notions of locative media art.

Crafting Change: Envisioning New-Media Arts as Critical Pedagogy

As India enters the sixth year of the new millennium, there seems to be ample evidence to validate the claim that it is new technologies and their infrastructures that have supported and enabled its current economic revolution. This revolution promises a new society based on knowledge and information. This emphasis poses tremendous challenges to educators and forces them to question the fundamental tenets on which they would develop pedagogies and create learning that is both sustainable and critical. The author argues that the process of creating new-media art can in itself be construed as critical pedagogic practice and that new-media artists have a role to play as public intellectuals.

Degrees of Freedom: Models of Corporate Relationships

The author discusses three models of corporate partnership that support the creation of new-media art: directed altruism, skunk works (product development), and regulated self-interest. Similar activities can occur across these models, but expectations, criteria for assessment and final outcomes may differ. Clarifying the rules of engagement for arts organizations and artists when they work with corporations is critical to success for both artists and companies. This essay provides a framework and examples for each model from Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It evaluates failures as well as successes.