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 references

Mycena 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.”

References

Essay for Dynamic Visualization / Aalto Mlab.

Last Clock

Defined by its historical origins, visualization of data has a strong scientific background. In general, data visualization is usually perceived to have a rather neutral nature, serving purpose of being a presentational tool or a reflector of a certain perspective on a given data set.

Surely this notion position has not been left without a discussion. On the other side, some see that role of data visualization should be even more handled and strict, serving scientific objects with great efficiency (such as studying networks with hive plot). On the other hand, some identify data visualization as a simplifying or aesthetic methodology, which aims to clear out complicated data into information or even a narrative.

Another position, artistic data visualization, is brought up by Viegas and Watterberg.

Writers (Viegas & Martin) see that the purpose of artistic data visualization – on contrary to previous notions – is not to serve as a presentational tool or as a reflector but to be an artistic artifact itself, using scientific methodologies as ground surface for creation. This is similar to generative art, where conduction of selected scripts and algorithms results in a creation of new artistic pieces. In other words artistic data visualization is based on real data sets and distinguished from other types of visualizations by artistic intention.

As examples Viegas & Martin present, among others, Jason Savalon‘s blurry pictures, composed through blending numerous thematic photos into one ‘average’ frame; Golan Levin’s interactive study of numbers and cultural relationship to integers and visual Last Clock that creates digital watch using slices of surveillance video footage, also published with some modifications as an iPad application.

These static and interactive pieces are quite exciting and beautiful independent instances but is the notion ‘artistic data visualization’ accurate or even relevant?

Viegas and Watterbeng has a curious point: with this type of work “artists are committing various sins of visual analytics”. This is true: artists use data sets to draw a rough framework for artistic composition, not as an iron rule for valid visualization. I am not sure, whether the term is thus suitable. The more abstract the outcome, the further the artist takes the resulting artifact away from the initial data source. If I would for instans compress all available internet data into a one huge black cube, would that be still consider as artistic data visualization work? I could defend myself by saying that it’s real visualization of data, only extremely zoomed out.

References

This essay is written for Dynamic Visualization course / Alto Mlab.

Million details

Imagine standing on a busy city street. In a glimpse, your eyes capture the landscape and you brain analyses thousands of various details that fall instantly into combination of patterns. You see pedestrians, public transport, trees, garbage, hipster guys with mustaches toggling their iPhones, giggling girls, pooping pidgins and so one.

Despite this enormous amount of data, one will not get confused simply because at this stage the primary object is to grasp an overall picture – having an light observation of a landscape and it’s content. Anxioty might occure if one is already looking for something specific and especially if limited by time or other resource; for instants running late from work and desperately looking for a taxi. In this case, the person is subjected to a keyword and is ‘browsing’ the landscape in front of oneself – looking for anything that has a shape of a car, is close, is yellow and has a bright light on the top of the cabin. But when there is no such goal, the question that drives one’s observation is not “where is it” but “what’s here in general?”.

Manovich (2011) points out that latter question is quite rare in media related research. It is obvious that due the enormous amount of media data available , it is outside our abilities to actually see the content of them all.

From libraries, tv channels and movies to web classification manners such as grids, lists, slides, galleries and thumbnails the main object is to show a capture of larger collection. What these methods do not show is an overall shape of the given collection. One can surely utilize metadata, but it is still not fully adopted; even the best examples of it do not reflect on the content itself in a same rich manner as our human comprehension does when we actually see the content. Not to mention the data access itself: search machines are based on the idea that person knows what she is looking for, excluding Google’s beeing lucky -randomizer. (Manovich, 2011.)

In other words, data set of hundreds items with metadata notion “tropical island videos” gives far less information regarding content patterns as does original conclusions drawn by a person who has actually seen videos of different tropical islands.

Dealing with visual data

Eleven Montage

In his paper Manovich (2011) presents the idea of media visualization – a methodology to deal with large collections of videos and still images. Usually media is studied through translation into numbers and dealing with differences between the numeric results. In media visualization the outcome is another media, thus the result is reposition of media that was at hand.

Manovich (2011) proposes three main techniques.

Image montage collects images or video frames in one larger overview or in other words, zooming out. Images can be brought together and organized into tight image grids by using even the most basic metadata such as production date, size or creator. This allows to see new patterns, locate items that stand out, detect clusters and spot differences.

Temporal and spatial sampling selects a subset of images from image sequence, such as page numbers, frames and upload dates or image parts, such as cropped area.

Remapping rearranges the data accordingly to a specific variable, such as color saturation or amount of movement in one video shot.

Reflections

Manovich turns around the ground idea of media consumption. We are inevitably used to deal with single media items at time – one movie, one book, one picture. It is clear that this should be the case in most situation – we can only concentrate on one to few ‘reality mapping’ at the time. But it is also true that when zoomed away enough, we can also deal rather easily with enormous amount of data. This also changes the nature and results of our observation: we begin to spot more general differences and similarities, see re-occurring patterns and can summarize more delicate outlines of the data set in question.

I see Manovich’s note more enlightening and groundbreaking than the actual visualization techniques that were used for creating examples. His approach turns current search-driven media research upside down, opening great possibilities for practical implementation.

References