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Museums of New Media Art

1) New Media Art Museums should effectively incorporate technology and information to create new forms of art that allow the user to interact with the art piece. 

2) There should be a sense in which New Media Art Museums differ from the traditional museum both in the way that it displays its artworks as well as what qualifies to be displayed as artwork. 

3) The incorporation of art and technology should flow seamlessly together in a New Media Art Museum, where the two serve to compliment and elevate one another. 

4) Artworks curated in a New Media Art Museum should allow for maximum user interaction and manipulation, decreasing the distance between the spectator and the artwork itself. 

5) New Media Art Museums ought to encourage the collaboration of new forms of art with existing forms of art. 

6) New Media Art Museums should display art that effectively uses some form of technology to manipulate previously existing information into a new presentation of data. 

7) Because New Media art is so interactive, New Media Art Museums should not be able to exist without the participation of viewers who in a sense, become a part of the museum. 

8) Within a New Media Art Museum should exist artworks that would not be able to be hung up and displayed in a traditional art museum. 

9) New Media Art Museums should cause participants and viewers to question what constitutes as an artwork and where the boundaries of an art world begin and end. 

10) New Media Art Museums should comprise both of digital and physical components. 

HaRdWaRe – Marc Garrett 2002

http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/hardware/index.htm

This  is by no means an easy piece to swallow. Artist Marc Garrett transforms the secret data of a computers hardware into art, striving to expose all the dirty things that people look at while on their computers. His idea that the content of computer history simply reflects the human thoughts is a scary one indeed, and forces one to question what it would be like if someone were to look inside of our technological database. Pairing images with different parts of the inside of a computer hard drive, Garrett challenges the viewer to imagine their computer search history come to life. 

Your sFace or Mine? – Reginald Brookes 2004

http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/26910/webpage/Reginald_Brooks/Code/Html/5face/netart6.htm

Brookes explores the idea of the perfect, and sometimes not so perfect, geometric features of the human face and how each part of a face can contribute so much emotion to the whole face. With the concept “The parts make up the whole”, this interactive artwork takes apart the human faces and replaces each part with various different renditions and recreations of that specific part of the face, allowing the user to create constantly changing and unique faces. 

Arts 12 Research Paper

Lanier, Ranciere, and Foucault all bring up important and different perspectives on the engagement between a viewer and a participant. This could be either between a viewer and an artwork, a viewer and a show, or even between two people with distinguished roles. Each calls to question the role of the viewer and how they are to engage with what’s in front of them, if at all.

Lanier explores the idea of “flatness” in the digital world, and the difference between the real and ideal computer. While ideal computers allow one to freely create whatever program they wish, an actual program cannot exist without a real computer that has limitations and rules. These real computers are often based off of existing programs and restrict the amount of freedom that a user has.  This is why Lanier refers to the ideal computer as a “flat” global world – people are able to create and program from the ground up with no previous boundaries or rules that they have to base off of. This “flatness” should be any opportunity for users to create something new, to expand their horizons and build a world of their own, which is what Lanier suggests should happen. Regardless of this fact, it seems that people like to just base their work off of existing art or media, not using the true purpose of ideal computers to create something that is completely unique and original.

Ranciere looks not at the relationship between a person and an object, but more the relationship between a person and performance. Dance or theatre, as an art form, would not exist without viewers and people who watch what is unfolding before them. In his work titled “Emancipated Spectator”, Ranciere questions the role of a spectator as a paradoxical role that can lead to one of two realities. He suggests the word spectator implies that that their role is passive and that they are unable to interact with the performance before the, and thus implying that theater or performance is dull and lifeless. The other reality is that the spectators are an essential part of the show and that it is “the living body of a community enacting its own principle.” They are a crucial in the whole experience of the theatre and the performance as an art, and therefore the art is dependent on them just as much as it is on the actual performance.

Foucault applies the idea of the Panoptic building to our everyday life. The Panoptic building, created by English philosopher Bentham in the eighteenth century, allowed an observer to observe people of an institution without those people knowing if they’re being watched or not. This gave the observers great authority and power because the inmates never knew when they needed to be on their best behavior giving the observer control over the behaviors and actions of those inmates. Similarly, this directly applies to our society today and how we are constantly being tracked and watched without our knowledge. Whether it’s where we spend our money, what we surf on the web, or what we’re doing at the shopping mall, we are constantly being observed. Regardless of if we are aware or it or not, society shapes our behavior in this way and is able to control what we do. 

New Media Manifesto

New media is bold. New media is evolving. New media is innovation. New media is collaboration. New media is avant-garde. New media is challenging people to think bigger, think better, think brighter. New media is technology. New media is more than technology. New media is the accessibility of information. New media is the manipulation of data into more data. New media is the fusion of cultural conventions and software conventions. New media is, as Gere states, important for its capacity to reflect our current technological condition. New media is the transformation of old art into new art. New media is the manifestation of aesthetics. New media is what you want it to be. Or what he wants it to be. Or what she wants it to be.

New media is creating new outlets for art. New media is challenging the traditional view of art and the art world. New media is creating a new type of gallery and a new arena for New media is progression from the past. New media is propelling us into the future. New media is making a statement. New media is New media is what helps us engage with the process, not just the product. New media is pushing boundaries and drawing your own. New media is art. 

But how do we approach new media? Do we passively look at it? Do we engage with the software, the interface, the expressions, and the information? Do we categorize it into a type of art? Do we even see it as art? New media art is meant to be free and limitless, giving people the power to create and manipulate information. To change what they see and enhance what they know. It’s not to be neatly hung in a gallery or filed into a taxonomy of art. New media art is meant to 

Gere

So…what is New Media?

Manovich and Borges have the answer to that! And even though they are quite different perspectives on the use and meaning of New Media, both help in getting a better understanding of this extreme vast and expanding area of art. Manovich explores the meaning and uses of New Media as an art form and his underlying point throughout his eight propositions is that New Media is a combination of cultural and computing components that provide new ways to access and manipulation information. Borges, on other hand, discusses New Media as a historical and cultural archive that allows us to access previous art works as well as preserve pieces that will be influential to our future development as a society. Through their discussion of the history, development, goals, and examples of New Media, Manovich and Borges help to paint a fuller picture of exactly what types of art fall under the arena of New Media. Interestingly enough, they both make use of a form of New Media in their articles that allow the reader to both access culturally sensitive information and view a “gallery” of information that they feel is relevant through the integration of hyperlinks. 

Hyperlinks are embedded throughout the body of their articles and help to point the reader to even greater bodies of information beyond the essay itself. The authors are able to mention a variety of different artists, art works, terms, and references without having to go into great detail about what they are because the reader can simply click on the link and learn more themselves. Instead of explaining what a photomontage is, they can simply include a hyperlink that take the reader to a site all about photomontages. This is the aspect of New Media that allows more access to information that Manovich discusses, as well the aspect of New Media that allows the use of computer technology for greater distribution and exhibition of information (second proposition). It also ties in Manovich’s second aspect of New Media that allows for the manipulation of information and Borges’ idea that New Media allows one to preserve information or work that can shape future generations. The links take the reader to very specific sites and therefore, allows the author to manipulate what type of information the reader immediately sees and allows them to shape their view of a particular topic. This collection of links, sites, and information ultimately becomes a “virtual gallery” of information on the topic of the article that people can later access. These hyperlinks affirm Borges’ view of New Media functioning as a tool for people to view certain information and even look back on it as a part of art history.