Intro to the New Media Reader #2

This intro to The New Media Reader, by Lev Manovich, titled New Media from Borges to HTML begins by giving us a brief history of the research of new media. Essentially, worldwide research of artistic mediums using computers began in the late 1970s. By the 1990s, the internet in the United States had become an everyday commonplace, and had grown faster in the US than Europe for various reasons. Yet the US was slow to develop new media art due to low public interest. Sophisticated European art galleries led to the development of a new form of art: the interactive computer instillation. Manovich brings up the question of the need for new media research in an age where artists of all mediums use digital computers to modify their artwork.  The research then simply becomes a venue for enthusiasts to experiment with the latest technologies.  

Lev Manovich states that “as a result these technologies themselves have become the greatest art works of today.” Such as the web itself, and other programs such as Final Cut Pro and After Effects. This modern culture, designed for the masses by institutions is no less a work of great art than an individual creating a painting or writing a book, yet the history of art is going to favor the individual rather than the collected cultural art (digital programming). Other such artistic fields that are yet to be recognized are music videos, cinematography, set design, and industrial design.

What is New Media?
1: Cyberculture. “Cyberculture is focused on the social and on networking; new media is focused on the cultural and computing.”

2: New Media is a distribution platform. They are cultural objects such as the internet, web sites, computer games, and other such devices of transferring data.

3: Digital Data Controlled by Software. The idea that digital information can be manipulated to create multiple meanings or creations based on the program used.

4: Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software. Essentially the software we create is not fully utilized to its potential because of our cultural conventions.

5: The Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology. Every new device that enters into our culture, such as the TV, the camera, undergoes a ‘new media’ stage. As new technology is introduced the aesthetic of the medium changes. Like with DV tapes. A filmmaker could then shoot footage for up to 120 minutes, and make new films based on this technology.

6: Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies. New media serves to make tasks that would normally take a manual execution a long time, into an instantaneous solution. Manipulating documents, which previously were written out by hand, is now a simple task. As well as using Photoshop to create a visual montage is now a commonplace occurance.

7: Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia. Ideas that were previously avant-garde, such as an artists collage which turned into the basic feature of ‘cut and paste’, and the idea of a pull down menu emerged from the use of movable frames. The metamedia is a recognition that the culture in the 1980s was reworking already existing content, rather than inventing new ideas.

8: Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing. There are many periods of cultural height throughout history that can be linked to new media, such as the 1920s and 1960s.