New+Media+From+Borges+to+HTML+-+A+Summary

New media: understood as computer based artistic activities
Changes to New Media Downfall of New Media
 * Took ten years to become mainstream
 * SIGGRAPH (US) and Ars Electronica (Australia)
 * n Gathered computer artists since 1970s
 * n The field really took shape in the 1980s
 * n New institutions devoted to New Media is founded around the 1990s
 * n Europe and Japan are still the best places to see and discuss New Media Adapting to new media
 * Countries uses technology developed in the US in-depth before the US
 * n New technologies assimilate and emerge quickly in the US
 * u Makes new technologies “invisible” almost overnight
 * n Higher cost and slower speed of assimilation allows other countries to really explore the new technologies
 * u Example: internet was adapted slower in Europe slower than the US
 * n US’ slow reaction towards New Media is evident through its minimal public support for arts and artists
 * u Lack of government funding
 * n In the US, two entities could support New Media
 * u Commercial mass market
 * u Commercial art culture
 * l More progressive in experimenting with New Media
 * n Computers games, network driven multimedia (CDs, DVDs, animations…etc)
 * n Conflict between the relationship of “art” and “New Media”
 * u Author
 * l One-of-a-kind art object
 * l Single distribution of art work
 * n Museums, libraries, galleries…etc
 * u New Media
 * l Mass distribution
 * l Collective/collaborative authorship
 * l Display of new media requires equipments out of reach by museums and galleries in the 1990s
 * n Opposite to the US, Europe and other countries show support for new media art
 * l Funding by the government
 * l Installation of equipments in public places.
 * l Implementation of “interactive computers” in the 1990s
 * Increasing speed of internet
 * n Education institutions created graduate and undergraduate degrees for various forms of New Media
 * Museums in the US started to create galleries and rooms specifically for New Media arts
 * New literature publications and establishment of foundations dedicated to New Media
 * n New Media is now a matured, acquired institutional subject (2001)
 * Most artists (and anyone who knows anything about computers) now routinely use computers to create/edit art work
 * Where are the deep, conceptual roots of art?

Software Design and Modern Art: Parallel Projects
What is New Media now? Parallelism Cultural memory
 * Defined as parallel tendencies in modern art
 * n Parallelism
 * u Changes the art-technology relationship
 * The fast rising of technologies has become an art form
 * n Example: the greatest hypertext text is the Web itself
 * u Dynamic and unpredictable
 * n Computer application inventors and scientists are great artists themselves
 * u The most remembered artists this moment of history
 * Jorge Borges and Vannevar Bush
 * n Conceptualized the idea of massive branching system to represent human experience
 * New Media Reader
 * n Presentation of ideas
 * n Description of ideas that’s already realized
 * Takes a few decades for institutions (museums, libraries, books…etc) to record New Media breakthroughs as “cultural memory”
 * Mass-media, industrial culture artists are not as recognized as individual artists
 * n Names of music video producers, set designers, cinematography…etc
 * Most recognized cultural field of art is computer science, more specifically, the branch of human-computer interface (HCI)
 * HCI computer scientists
 * n Modern artists
 * n Redefined and symbolized both new culture and old culture
 * u Human’s experience in this world
 * u All culture is being filtered through a single form of media: computers

What is New Media: Eight Propositions
__One__: New media vs. cyber culture
 * Cyber culture: the study of various social phenomenon associated with the internet
 * n Online communities, online multi-player games, issues of online identities…etc
 * n The emphasis is on SOCIAL phenomenon
 * Cyber culture is focused on social and networking; new media is focused on culture and computing

__Two__: New media (computer technologies) used as a distribution platform __Three__: New media as digital data controlled by software __Four__: New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of software
 * New media: culture objects that uses digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition
 * n Need to be revised every couple of years as new technologies form as well as assimilation of old and new technologies
 * u Books to e-books, analog to digital TV…etc
 * n But do all these things really have in common besides the fact that the distribution are all from computers?
 * Any new media that are represented digitally can be manipulated by software
 * n Example: a picture photoshopped
 * As new media gets controlled by software, it is expected to be following three principles
 * n Modularity, variability, and automation
 * u Does not proceed in a linear fashion


 * How to describe New Media today?
 * n Two cultural forces: cultural conventions and conventions of computer software (HCI)
 * n New media today is a mix between old conventions and new conventions of data representation, access and manipulation
 * u What we understood before as “culture” (narration from books…etc) is now “numerical data”

__Five__: New Media as the aesthetics that accompanies the early stages of new modern media and communication technology
 * Every modern media and new communication technology passes through a “new media stage”
 * “New technology give us a better access to “a better democracy”; it will eliminate the natural relationship between the observer and the observed (eliminating the distance)”
 * n Example: exactly after one hundred years after cinema was invented (kinetoscope 1892 [small screen] – full size cinema 1895 [big screen]), it was reinvented on the computer screen (QuickTime 1991 [small screen] – CD-ROM 1995 [big screen])

__Sixth__: New media as faster execution of algorithms previously executed manually through other technologies
 * Algorithms: a series of steps required to accomplish a task
 * n Computers can execute algorithms quickly, however, the same steps can be executed by human, although more slowly than computers


 * Think of new media as a massive speed-up of various manual techniques that have already existed
 * A problem with this faster execution
 * n The manipulated “work” is no longer original, computers does not leave things the way they are


 * Photos and images in modern days can be applied with multiple photomontages such as blur, transparency…etc within seconds
 * n Photomontage has undergone a fundamental change ever since the invention of scanners, programs (ie. Photoshop) and digital cameras


 * The speeding up of algorithms eliminates two other principles: real-time network communication and real-time control
 * n However, don’t think of computers are calculators, it’s a “cybernetic control device”, doing things in real-time such as computing pressed keys that couldn’t be done before

__Seventh__: New media as the encoding of modernist Avant-Garde; New media as meta-media
 * “New media” took a new meaning when avant-garde artists invented whole new visual and spatial languages and perspectives in the 1920s that we still use today
 * n the avant-garde visions and inventions is materialized in computers
 * u example: an avant-garde design of collage utilizes “cut and paste”, a command used daily by computer users
 * u example: the many “windows” and frames computer users pull up on a computer can be traced to Lissitzky and his “moveable frames” in 1926
 * n all arts of analog production has become a huge archive in which modern New media uses as raw data
 * u The old avant-garde media was about seeing the world differently, inventing new ways to represent reality, but the modern avant-garde media is about accessing and using these existing old media in a different way, hence meta-media


 * Meta-media is similar to the notion of post-modernism
 * n Reworking of existing content
 * n Quantity changing to quality

__Eight__: New media as parallel articulation of similar ideas in post-WWII art and modern computing
 * New media returns us to a pre-modernist cultural logic of eighteenth century
 * n Example: 18th century communities of readers who were also writers and participants on internet newsgroup of forums are both readers and writers
 * n Many other concepts in the 1960s were materialized with computers
 * u Combinatorics: creating images by varying a single parameter or by creating all possible combinations of a small number of element

Four Decades of New Media

 * Internet as a new media created “single global system” and connected world’s computers into a single networking