Inventing new media: what we can learn from new media art and media history

Throughout the human history, the design of different cultural techniques and media forms for representing human knowledge, collective and personal experience, and what we now call "data" have not been confined to single individuals or disciplines. To mention just a few examples, natural languages, printed books, a linear perspective, landscape photography, and documentary cinema have all been developed and refined over time by whole societies and multiple individuals.Today with the computer acting as the interface for all past, present, and emergent forms of media, the situation is quite different. Computer scientists working on media computing play the key role in how our societies will remember their histories, how we will represent ourselves and others, what we will imagine and what metaphors we use to understand reality. In short, to work on media computing today is to assume big cultural responsibility - and also have tremendous power to define new forms of media.Unfortunately, more often than not, computer scientists do not take advantage of their powers. Too often, they simply translate existing media forms and cultural techniques into software interfaces. For instance, the controls of software media players are modeled after VCR; Acrobat software tries to recreate the conventions of a printed page; etc. This made sense twenty years ago when people were coming to computers after having first experienced other media technologies --- but not today.While I do not want to position the whole field of digital art as more innovative in this respect, one can point at a number of artists who have dedicated their careers to use computers to invent substantially new forms of media, often with very exiting results. In my talk I will show and discuss a number of works by these artists. I will also talk about the selected historical moments than a new media form emerged to see what we can learn from these histories.