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The Revolutionary Beauty of New Media Art
Words Sandra Edmund
Society as we know it has changed over the past 20 years, where we have seen the evolution of the digital age rapidly change a variety of industries such as healthcare, finance, retail and interestly art. New media art is a term for artwork produced and designed by new media technologies. It includes a diverse set of categories such as computer graphic, digital art, video games, robotic, cyborg art, virtual art, computer animation, internet art and interactive art technologies, says Tech Editor Sandra Edmund.
The term ‘new media art’, defines itself through creating artwork which characterises itself from evolving from conventional visual arts such as paintings, sculpture and architecture.
Now you know the definition of New Media Art, the real question is where did it originate from?
Although progressive as technology continues to evolve it actually dates back to the moving image inventions of the 19th century such as the phenakistoscope (1833) which was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Through to the 1960s there has been a variety of light and kinetic art that has been seen as progenitors of new media art.
The first artist to spark this new creation was Wolf Vostell in 1958 who incorporated a TV set into his Black Room Cycle. From there the development of new technologies of videos produced the new media art experiments which later on advanced into biotechnology incorporation such as Eduardo Kac who began to explore DNA and genetics as a new art medium. Through the years, it has influenced new media arts to have theories developed around hypertext, networks, databases and interaction.
At the starting of the “.com” boom, it led two European artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans to create jodi.org, a website of artwork whose flashing images and scrambled green text believed to deconstruct the visual language of the web. They remixed found images and HTML scripts much like Dada artists altered with typography and photography from newspapers and magazines. The site altered the way that people thought about the Internet and provided a new way to publish information and open the possibility to be an art medium such as painting, video, photography and oil.
Fast-forward to the present day and new media art is a dynamic field that offers unreachable tools for artistic expression. New media art is becoming rapidly popular and accessible due to the circulation of personal computers. It has become a demoractic character of new media because the level of work produced is becoming impossible to measure.
Technology has contributed to the ever growing range of media that is involved in art production and contemporary art. For new media art this is only the beginning of the umbrella term as the digital world progresses into advanced revolutionary discoveries. Allowing new and emerging artists the opportunity to explore different spectrums of art and further adapt to the artistic beauty called new media art.