References in New Media Art
Early Angry Bird
What inspires new media artist? What is new in it? In this essay I will study the curious references, notion of originality and examples of new media art forms.
Essay is part of History and Visions of Interactive Media course of Tallinn University.
In this essay I am referring to new media as a type of digital channels and systems that enable interactivity, user-to-creator participation and community formation over certain media content. This post is not aiming to juxtapose new and traditional media but to study influences across both.
Generative Art
New in new media art
It does not take much to notice how rich and interesting new media art is.
The newness of new media art is most clearly in the new technologies such as Kinects, sensors and softwares as well as in powerful content resource and generator – internet.
New media art might refer to various subtypes. For example art and technology reinforces artistic development in the sphere of robotics and electronics. Art media might refer for instants to video and transmissions. (Tribe, 2011.)
Curious examples are found from art forms such as interactive installations, kinetic art, bio art, computer art and generative art. Internet has also exploded numerous types of social art such as animated photos, GIF-animations and more advanced or multilayered cultural objects like different types of co-projects and memes. This type of socially composed art – art with multiple authors – is made through strategic crowd-sourcing or by anonymous masses through various social media.
New digital formats, endless inspirational resources and virtual common knowledge provides possibility for anyone to try out their artistic skills. But does this decrease the value of the art?
Is art still unique?
Originality in art
Notion of originality is one of most populate dinner topics. Single artifacts such as a novel, a painting, a game or a performance, might be seen unique when studied closely in their content. When presented in a specific environments, such as in a theater or studied with the scope of a certain era, for instance “literature of 1920′s”, the level of examination is so close, that originality of the well made piece of work seems obvious and undeniable. For instants Romeo and Julia is a well known story, repeated by one generation after another. But if we study the synopsis on the more abstract level – two lovers haunted by their prohibited feelings – it is unreasonable to call the plot to be original.
Depending on the source, it has been debated that most stories can be fit into main seven to twenty general story lines. Let’s take for example few movies made this year. Plots rather often contain some sort of contradiction and resolution, such as man against machine (Transformers), man against technology (The Artist) or man against himself (Another Earth). Commonly story lines also use – as a main guiding force – objectives such as metamorphosis (Black Swan), revenge (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and temptation (Twilight). (Tobias, 1993.)
Examples of natural referencesMycena lux-coeli mushrooms / Light installation
Natural, Toy and Interactive Kaleidascope
Greek philosopher Plato compared art to imitation in his famous dialog collection Republica. Thus already in ancient Greece art – with addition to be a model of good and beauty – was seen also as mimesis, a correspondence to the physical world.
One can go even deeper in the study of originality and claim that there is no uniqueness in life at all. That every piece of creation is just a new type of replica of some existing formation or combination of them. Wheel is a copy of the shape of the sun. In a way every new artifact just adds a layer to the grandiose pile of imitations. And not only in art. For example activity theory (Egenström 2002) sees that all human actions are connected to a broader sphere thus everything we do is interviewed with something else.
Influences in Media art
New Media implies idea of novelty, which is surely true on many levels: there were no computers in ancient Greece and no touch screen installations in Shakespeare’s time.
Manuel Castells (2009, 407) writes about “space of flows” in his book “The rise of the network societies”. He describes that our society is constructed around flows – capital, information, technology. Flow is a dominating process of our economical, political and symbolic life. “The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows”.
Flow can also describe all the cross-borrowing and cross-referencing that is rather typical for new media art and cultural products. A children’s movie might borrow a song that has been a recent YouTube sensation by a person covering of an old LP-record, made by artist who was inspired by an old blues songs and so on.
When generalizing, the reference chain can often be drawn to the very beginning or human’s artistic activities.
What about antecedent from the recent past?
Dadaism
Tribe (2001) compare new media art to ideology of Dada: “the conceptual and aesthetic roots of New Media art extend back to the second decade of the twentieth century.” He sees that numerous dadaist strategies are repeated in new media art. These are photo-montages, collages, ready-made peaces, political actions and performance spiced up with irony and even absurdity.
Dada was seen to be anti-movement and anti-art, though being still praised as cultural activity. Also new media art seems to have this contradicting nature: there are many playful yet ironic examples that could be seen either as deliverable artistic pieces or just as products of procrastination.
Following image has a fragment of Duchamp’s Mona Lisa’s dadaist reincarnation with mustaches and a caption of men taking part of social project “Movembet”. Movember is an ironic global and social charity event of men growing their facial hair and documenting the process in various ways – such as in photo-collages like in the picture below.
Duchamp / Movember movement
An interesting point worth mentioning was made by Biro (2009) who saw that Dada also influenced concept of cyborgs. He saw that cyborgs, as we know them now, were actually inspired by the idea of post-human, developed by German dadaists in-between the two World Wars in the 1920′s.
Collage by Höch, H, "High Finance" (1923 in Biro, 2009).
Examples of cyborg art
Postmodernism
Postmodernism promoted the mash-up ideology that is now especially popular in today’s digital art: videos, digital illustration and installations – example might be seen in previous cyborg art pieces.
“It [postmodernism] embraced heterogeneity in art (i.e., the mixing of multiple media in a single work) and affirmed the idea of visual art’s interconnectedness with other forms of modernist art and mass culture, such as literature, music, poetry, theater, photography, and films.” (Biro 2009).
Postmodernism also studied the notion of hyperreality and its connection to simulacrum or in other words copies of objects without references to originals. Aylesworth (2010) explained it by saying “what is represented is representing itself”. Baudrillard (1993) also adds that hyperreal is a system of simulation of inner simulating, “it is that always already reproduced”. (Aylesworth 2010).
This sounds particular familiar in the case of internet memes. Of course it is biased to claim memes to be art. Regardless, they do emulate notion of hyperreality, creating endless unique variations of the same instances, such as with theme of “Sad Keanu” (images below).
Sad Keanu (caption of Google search results)
Pop art
One more antecedent ideology to mention is pop art. According to Tribe (2001) sees that as with the 50′s pop art, also new media art usually involves with or at least refers to commercial culture.
For instants Lichtenstein‘s usage of Ben-day dots (comic book look) can be seen as methodology reference for 2D works of eBoy who is building images pixel by pixel.
Linchtenstein / eBoy. Two types of pixel art.
However, in contrast to pop art, media art pieces created with popular culture elements are not usually distanced from their initial sources. Pop art was commonly distinguished from its reference and composed in a way that suited more conventional exposition: walls, galleries, magazines. New media artifacts are mostly kept close to the original environments – games, blogs, web portfolios, Facebook walls and so on.
Conclusions
In this essay I studied only a fraction of art references and new media art forms. Contemporary media art is blossoming and it is exciting to see what is going to happen next.
There are no unique topics in the new media art, nor there are purely original concepts. Uniqueness seems to lie not in the idea but in the context of the art piece and style of how it is made and presented.
The question that left me wondering was a perspective mentioned in the last reference, pop art. If media art is juxtaposing all the traditional meanings of art representation, collection and ownership – how could it be captured and culturally memorized? This topic would not result in one line (or even another essay) but I think Dietz (2006) had an interesting comment: “Collecting new media art is just like anything else, only different.”
