Ryszard W. Kluszczyński
NEW MEDIA ART
Introduction
The term “new media art” covers numerous, diverse phenomena with their own specific
properties. I will present these properties in the following discourse. The diversity within this
field sometimes leads to attempts at defining new media art by juxtaposing its numerous types.
However, such a definition renders the term meaningless, yielding in essence merely a
collective term encompassing a variety of individually defined types. Moreover, it fails to
provide criteria that would indicate the reasons for considering these particular types to be
forms of new media art. This term should, therefore, not be defined in reference to individual
media or a juxtapositioning of a number of them, but by indicating what unites them and makes
them types of new media art. This requires identifying the properties that make new media
“new”, that is, different from previous dominant media. The field of new media art remains
unstable, constantly in a process of transformation. This is so not merely because of the
emergence of new and different types of media, but also because of the transformations
constantly taking place in the multidirectional relations between them, including those resulting
from processes such as technological convergence, divergence, and remediation, which shape
different media configurations and produce hybrid forms. At the same time, however, this fact
does not mean we are dealing with a process of substitution, that newer media merely supplant
those that preceded them in time and assume their position and status, thereby becoming
“newer” new media. On the contrary, within certain limits defined by their properties, newer
media join older forms, thus expanding the overall field of new media and deepening its internal
differentiation. This is precisely what has occurred in new media art, whose individual types,
although seemingly rooted in the characteristics of the new media that gave birth to them, in
fact, have acquired their own character and status in relation to the overall new media
environment.
The category of new media art came into general use in the mid-1990s (Tribe, Jana, 2006,
7). The forms of artistic activity associated with it, whose beginnings I trace back to the 1950s
in the development of cybernetic and oscilloscope art, and in the academic and critical studies
that followed these transformations in art, have their own, even longer history. The theoretical
approaches to new media art developed by scholars and critics feature a relevant concepts and
terminology (Burnham, 1968; Reichardt, 1971; Nake, 1974; Popper, 1975; Druckrey, 1996;
Sommerer, Mignonneau, 1998; Manovich, 2001; Wilson, 2002; Tribe, Jana, 2006; Shanken,
2009), proposals for a historical ordering (Youngblood, 1970; Rush, 1999; Grau, 2003;
Frieling, Daniels, 2004; Wands, 2006; Grau, 2007; Cubitt, Thomas, 2013), and monographic
studies dedicated to numerous trends in and types of new media art (Franke, 1971; Kahn, 1999;
Goldberg, 2000; Weibel, 2001; Ascott, 2003; Paul, 2003; Green, 2004; Kac, 2005; Dixon,
Smith, 2007; Raley, 2009; Menkman, 2011). Many books on the work of selected artists and
analyses of individual works have also been published. In conjunction with the development
of new media art and scholarly reflection on it, a number of university courses and programmes
in art colleges were established. An institutional and exhibition system also developed,
supporting the production and presentation of works and the realisation of artistic and research
projects (such as Ars Electronica Center, Linz; ZKM ‒ Media Art Center, Karlsruhe;
InterCommunication Center, Tokyo). The first new media art exhibitions were held
(Cybernetic Serendipity, 1968; Software, 1970), and new media art magazines (such as
Leonardo, Neural, Artnodes), internet sites (such as Rhizome; Netzspannung.org; ADA:
Archive of Digital Art) and festivals (such as Ars Electronica, Linz; European Media Art
Festival, Osnabrück; Multimediale, Karlsruhe or Transmediale, Berlin) emerged. New media
art thereby acquired a full-fledged institutional framework.
In the following paragraphs, I will analyse the concept and multiform phenomenon of new
media art on four levels.
I will first consider it in terms of the interaction between art theory and the related
conceptual understanding of this medium as an artistic discipline and a material; and media
theory, and its approach to the medium as a technical means of communication. In doing so, I
will make an effort to avoid privileging either of these two contexts, and explain why a
definitional balance and consensus should be sought instead.
Secondly, I will point out and analyse the properties that characterise new media and new
media art, and the consequences of trying to define them by assigning them a set of defining
characteristics. In doing so, I will draw attention in particular to the possibilities that emerge
from defining new media and new media art without placing them on a historical timeline.
Thirdly, I will provide both an overview of the history of new media art and examine the
complexity and multiplicity of its types, revealing their diverse status.
Fourthly, I will highlight three basic factors of new media art: newmediality ‒ referring to
the “technical-new media” properties of new media art that emerged as a result of the
introduction of new technical means of communication into the field of art as tools for creative
work; transmediality ‒ referring to the interaction between new and traditional media, whereby
art utilising old and new technical means enter into a meaningful relationship or are even
integrated into traditional fields of art, creating transmedial forms; and transdisciplinarity ‒
referring to the relations between artistic new-media and transmedia disciplines and other, nonartistic disciplines of social practice, such as science, the humanities, politics and social
activism. These relationships result in the construction of transdisciplinary artistic forms.
I will also explain how changes in the hierarchy among these three factors have over time
shaped new media art history. I will construct my position both through the use of and in
discussion with a number of concepts found in new media art theory.
Between art theory and media theory
If we look at how new media art has been discussed in the literature to date, we see that this
concept has been shaped in relation to two distinct paradigms. In each of them the notion of
medium is understood differently, and the boundary between old and new media is located in
a different place.
The first is art theory. Within this paradigm, “medium” means the methods, materials and
tools used in creative work and the manner in which their relation to a work is shaped. The
Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia defines it very precisely: “Medium, a term in art used in its
broadest sense to describe the various methods and materials of the artist; thus painting,
sculpture, and drawing are three different media, and bronze, marble, and wood are three of the
media of sculpture. In a more restricted sense, the word refers to the substance with which
pigment is mixed to make paint, for example, water in water-colour painting, egg yolk in
tempera, and linseed oil in oil painting” (Norwich, 1990, 289).
All media in this context ‒ old and new ‒ are relatively coherent sets of historically
connected materials and structural determinants defining art, around which various types of art
have arisen or, to state it differently, various fields of artistic creativity defined by different
combinations of materials, methods, and tools, have come into being. Classical (old) media in
art are the manual methods and physical materials traditionally used in creative work. New
media in art, on the other hand, are fields in which the tools and creative work methods utilised
are radically different from those used in classical media, and are generally labelled nontraditional. These material and structural innovations lead to further, even more far-reaching
changes. New media differ from classical media not only in the tools and materials used and
the ways in which works are produced, but also in their conception of the creative process and
the position and role of the artist in it, as well as the status of the work itself (upsetting the
notions of objectivity, uniqueness, materiality, and durability). The properties of the resulting
works, which are largely related to those of new media, are the source of the difference between
traditional (old) and new media.
New media in this context include photography and film, which, unlike traditional media,
make use of technical, semi-automated and autonomous tools and procedures (operating to a
certain extent outside the field of the artist՚s agency), and use light as a material to bring into
existence new types of artefacts. To these technical new media, we can add video and a variety
of computer media, in which these differences are further accentuated.
The second paradigm in the context of which the notion of new media art is framed is media
and communication theory, and within it, theory of technical media (i.e. apparatus-based
media: apparatus-based production, distribution/sharing, and reception). The concept of
medium is understood here as “an intermediate agency that enables communication to take
place” (O՚Sullivan et al, 1995: 176). In this case, the basic definition of the medium is quite
different from the one used in the context of art theory. “The medium is basically the technical
or physical means of converting the message into a signal capable of being transmitted along
the channel.” (Fiske, 1990, 17). Defined in this way, media are not in themselves related to art,
but rather serve as a means for communication. They become relevant to art only when they
are used as art media. Communication media were created and developed over centuries, and
include speech, writing, printing, telegraph, photography, radio, and television. When we
accept and include in our considerations Marshall McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions
(“All media are extensions of some human faculty ‒ psychic or physical”; McLuhan, Fiore,
1967, 26), the spectrum of mediality expands considerably. Refashioning the concept of
medium in this way – which initially seems to challenge the theory of media as communication
– serves us well today, in our era of Internet communication and virtual and augmented reality,
and enhances the power of critical reflection on art projects organised around new media,
especially those focused on its transdisciplinary aspect. It also opens the way for such new
media as robotics, AI, biotechnology and nanotechnology, and corresponding artistic uses.
The process of shaping new media began within this paradigm in the 1940s, with the
invention of the electronic computer, and progressed dynamically over the next half century,
through the successive introduction of new media technologies, such as VR, hypermedia, and
mobile and locative media, up until the moment of the second birth of the Internet (the World
Wide Web) and the emergence of a widely shared belief that the world of media and
communication practices has been completely transformed and acquired new dimensions
(Lister et al., 2009, 10).
New media have fundamentally altered prevailing concepts, structures, and forms tied to
communication processes, transforming the relations between their participants and the forms
of activity expected from them, and introducing new methods for obtaining information and
shaping experience. Sweeping changes have occurred in all the most important aspects of the
new media environment and, consequently, in the new fields of art that have developed around
them; this includes the means of engaging participants in communication, the roles and tasks
foreseen for them, and the devices created to meet these new challenges.
In distinguishing these two paradigms for considering old and new media in art, it is also
worth emphasising the differences in the meanings of two categories: the media of art and
media art. The word “media” has a different meaning in each of these expressions, and in each
case, maintains a connection with one of the two previously indicated paradigms. In the media
of art, the word “media” means all the means and materials used in artistic creation. Here we
remain within the context of art theory. In the concept of media art, the word “media” refers to
the technical media that are used as a medium of art. Here we are operating under the influence
of media and communication theory. These two categories designate two groups of artistic
types.
One would expect that media art simply fall within the realm of the media of art, comprising
a distinct separate part of it. However, the interrelationship between the two concepts ‒ when
viewed historically ‒ is more complicated. This is evident, for example, in a distinction
proposed by Christiane Paul (2003) in regard to digital technologies, which she argues can be
used as either tools or media. Extending Paul՚s position to all – and not just digital – media
technologies, we can say that they not only make possible both media art and new media art,
but also, to varying degrees, influence all other media of art. These new technological tools not
only can be used to bolster creative processes in traditional media, they can also endow the
works thus created with properties that are distinct from those otherwise found in such
traditional media, which in turn influences the nature of their reception. The clarity of the
distinction proposed by Paul between tools (which serve artists in their creative work) and
media (which create new forms of receptive, artistic experience) is slowly weakening, and
sometimes even disappearing in relation to the hybridity of contemporary art. Thus, media art
and new media are no longer a separate enclave or enclaves within the realm of the media of
art; they permeate it throughout, yielding mixed forms, including multi-, inter-, and transmedia.
In becoming instruments and an environment for artistic practices, new media technologies
have not only profoundly changed the character and course of creative processes and the
properties of the resulting works, as I wrote earlier. They have also fundamentally transformed
the ways in which these works are perceived by viewers, thus establishing entirely new
frameworks for experiencing the art created. As a result, they also completely transform the
overall understanding of aesthetic experience, including its concepts, structures, and key
components. As a result, some technical media that fall within the first paradigm once had the
status of new media, such as photography or film, but within the second paradigm were
transferred into the circle of old media. The distinction between media art and new media art
is made within the second paradigm with reference to an analogous distinction grounded in
media theory. This position seems to currently be dominant in critical and academic reflection.
The conviction seems to prevail that new media art is conditioned exclusively by the same set
of concepts and principles that characterise new technical and communicative media. New
media art is art that uses as its creative workforce new media, which are defined as such on the
grounds of media theory.
It should be noted, however, that an effort to identify new media art to a certain (sometimes
significant) degree with technical media art en masse is visible in many approaches to this
problem. It can be seen, for example, in Michael Rush’s New Media in Late 20th-Century Art
(1999), where he discusses the problems of media performance, video art, video installation
art, and digital art, and clearly identifies new media art with technical media art in the broadest
sense of the term (and not without reason, also considers photography in the book’s
introduction). Tribe and Jana (2006), in turn, taking a similar stance to Rush, attempt to
combine two historical currents in their research: art and technology and media art. Within the
former, they distinguish such phenomena as electronic art, robotic art, and genomic art, while
among the media arts they point to video art, transmission art, and experimental film as
important examples. In the field of new media art that emerges from their specific integration
of these two currents, Tribe and Jana focus in particular on electronic and digital art (6‒7). A
similar position is taken by Frank Popper (2007). Meanwhile, the editors and authors of the
texts collected in the volume Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts
(Lovejoy et al., 2011), have chosen to take a broad research perspective, like their predecessors,
complementing it with art-science relations.
Associating new media arts exclusively with technical media, that is, defining them in the
context of media art – though one can easily find numerous examples of such an approach – is
a flawed stance, if only because technical media are so diverse in nature, and, as a result, the
works they produce can belong to completely different aesthetic spheres: photography, for
example, has more in common with graphics and painting than with virtual reality or the
Internet. Placing them all within the field of new media art deprives this concept of clarity.
Thus, if one wanted to understand new artistic media in technical terms, one should narrow the
scope of one’s analysis to those media treated as new on the grounds of media theory, i.e.,
consider their character within the narrower context of media art. As I have already mentioned,
such an attitude is currently rather common among researchers of new media art. I believe,
however, that the most appropriate approach to this problematic is to link the two approaches,
to combine the perspective emerging from art theory with that which has its origins in media
theory. This is not merely because in numerous conceptions of new media art, such as those
cited earlier, we find the roots of new media art in both paradigms. It is necessary to do so in
order to grasp new media art in its broader dimensions, encompassing both its new media factor
and its transmedia and transdisciplinary factors. This is not just a matter of including old
technical media in particular, but rather of considering selected non-technical media. Not only
contemporary new media art, but also numerous works that preceded or heralded it (such as
Edward Steichen Delphiniums, MoMA, NYC, 1936) often engage, alongside media
technologies (and sometimes instead of them), other means, such as biomedia, which are
sometimes integrated with traditional art media (as in the case of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s
semi-living sculptures), or merged with both traditional art media and technical now media (as
in the case of Guy Ben-Ary’s biorobotic installations). New media artworks often emerge from
the integration of traditional media (such as painting) and technical, even pre-digital media, as
in the case of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s The Value of Art. Such an extended
understanding of the notion of new media art makes it possible to include a wide spectrum of
artistic phenomena, most of which are significantly formatted by new technical media, without
losing sight of those forms which, while sometimes depending only indirectly on new technical
media, are largely defined by non-technical media. This is another reason to assume that new
media art acquires its character from the properties it possesses rather than from the time in
which the media it uses were created. It is worth noting that many of the concepts in new media
art cited thus far define its concepts, both in relation to the media of art and media art, precisely
by means of the properties it possesses and not by the time of its invention or emergence as a
medium of art (although this is not always articulated expressis verbis).
Defining new media art in this way avoids cumbersome and unfounded considerations of
the position of new media art on a timeline. It is not the moment of its appearance that
determines whether a given medium of art belongs to the circle of old or new, but the properties
it possesses.
The conflict between these two conceptual approaches to the ‘newness’ of media can be
resolved by building our conceptual understanding of them on an effort to identify the
characteristics that define them, rather than the technologies or materials they make use of.
Thus, we do not have to decide which of the two indicated paradigms is the source of and
reference for new media art. Artworks that possess properties considered to be definitive of
new media, belong to new media art, irrespective of any paradigmatic attribution. It is this
concept ‒ understanding new media art by identifying the set of characteristics, the matrix of
properties, that define it ‒ that I consider to be the only correct approach.
Characteristics of new media art
As I have already stated, new media obtain the attribute of ‘newness’ not because of their
privileged place on a timeline, but because of the characteristics they possess. New media are
distinguished and defined by reference to a set of properties that are perceived as constitutive
of them. The nature of new media art is no different. New media art shares with new media the
attributes that define it.
This is Lev Manovich՚s (2001) approach to defining new media. He ascribes five
characteristics to new media, which he calls principles: numerical representation ‒ a new media
object is programmable; modularity ‒ new media has a fractal structure; automation ‒ many
operations in new media are automated; variability ‒ new media object can exist in different
versions, potentially infinite in number; and cultural transcoding ‒ the structure of the new
media object adopts the conventions of computer data organisation (27‒48). These five
properties characterise both new media as such and new media art.
Manovich assumes that the emergence of new media is a direct result of the
computerisation of media (27). He argues that new media emerged as a result of the
intertwining of two previously separate, independently progressive processes: the development
of computing and the development of media technologies (25‒26). He points out that these two
processes begin their parallel histories in the 1840s, when Louis Daguerre invented the
prototype of the photographic camera (1839), and Charles Babbage, having first developed the
concept of the differential machine (1822), then designed an analytical machine ‒ the prototype
of the computer (1837). The final synthesis of these two processes, which took place through
the translation of media languages into a numerical computer language, was, according to
Manovich, the beginning of the history of new media. At the same time, Manovich, as he
himself writes explicitly (52), tries not to use the word “digital” in his book, thus rejecting the
possibility of considering digitality a defining principle of new media. He is right to do so,
because the place of this category is on a different level than that occupied by the principles of
new media he distinguishes. However, Manovich՚s not taking digitality into account when
defining new media represents a kind of inconsistency in his concept. Manovich refers to the
first two properties of new media he distinguishes ‒ numerical representation and modularity
‒ as “material” principles (45). In another place he states that “the last three principles are
dependent on the first two” (27). In essence, they too can be ascribed a material character. All
five principles of new media, which as products of computerisation are inescapably likewise
determinants of digitality, are in fact characteristics of a new media material. Manovich՚s
concept revitalises for the purposes of new media the traditional concept of the medium as
material, casting digitality in this role. However, Manovich himself prefers to speak of the
principles/properties of digitality rather than of digitality itself, presumably in order to avoid
defining new media unequivocally as identical with digital media and thus creating the
possibility of finding in this field other, non-digital objects that would possess analogous
properties. He could not achieve this in any other way because, in adopting a material
perspective on new media, he had to acknowledge that every new media object is characterised
by all the identified principles. All the properties of the material inevitably appear in all the
objects that use it. It is probably for this reason, that in order to adopt such an inclusive, artistic
approach, attributes other researchers considered as defining new media – interactivity,
interface, hypermedia, and database – which cannot be considered characteristics of digital
material, Manovich preferred to consider as additional determinants of another of the principles
he distinguished ‒ variability (37‒44) – thereby reducing them to an inferior level and
depriving them of their definitive meaning.
Probably for the same reason, Manovich failed to notice or take into account in his
conception yet another technological process which, like the two technologies he mentions (the
analytical machine and the daguerreotype), also came into being in the 1840s, and which
supplements the history of the formation of new media, introducing an extremely important
aspect: the electric telegraph (1837/1838). Its further evolution as part of the history of
telecommunications media, found its most contemporary continuation in the form of the
Internet (and along the way, radio, telephone, and television). However, if Manovich had taken
this technology into account, his picture of the prehistory of new media would otherwise be
accurate, for while Daguerre՚s invention began only the history of technical visual
representational media, it would have been much more difficult for him to sustain a material
vision of new media. The evolution from the electric telegraph to the Internet, when we place
it within the paradigm of new media theory, and accordingly new media art, leads us to
supplement the set of properties that define them with, first, telecommunications and, second,
telematics, mobility, and networking. These properties, while seemingly necessary in other
theoretical concepts of new media, ultimately rule out the possibility of seeing new media as
digital material.
Other scholars who have taken up the challenge of defining new media by identifying the
set of properties that characterise them, have, unlike Manovich, assumed, without being
constrained by material requirements, that not all the properties indicated must be present in
all new media objects. This position was articulated expressis verbis by the authors of New
Media: A Critical Introduction, who write: “The characteristics (…) should be seen as part of
a matrix of qualities that we argue is what makes new media different. Not all of these qualities
will be present in all examples of new media ‒ they will be present in different degrees and in
different mix” (Lister, 2009, 44).
Moreover, they also recognised that these qualities may have non-technological causes.
“These qualities,” they write further, “are not wholly functions of technology ‒ they are all
imbricated into the organization of culture…” (Ibid.). This decision proved to be important not
only for the study of the social consequences of the development of new media and the
formation of cybercultural orders, but also for the study of art, opening up the possibility of
considering part of the field of new media art likewise those phenomena that draw analogous
properties from other, non-technological sources.
The team of researchers cited above concluded that new media should be characterised by
means of six properties: digitality, interactivity, hypertextuality, virtuality, network, and
simulation (Lister et al, 2009, 13‒44). The sets of properties proposed by Manovich and Lister
et al. can be combined by replacing digitality from the latter concept with the five properties
indicated in the former. It is also worth noting that two of the four features additionally
identified by Manovich as accompanying variability ‒ interactivity and hypermediality ‒ are
among the basic properties of new media proposed by Lister, et al. The other two ‒ interface
and database (in the form of an archive) ‒ are included in another proposal ‒ the set proposed
by the authors of the book New Media: The Key Concepts (Gane, Beer, 2008), alongside four
others: information, network, interactivity and simulation, three of which (all except
information) are also present in set proposed by Lister, et al. Information (along with network),
in turn, can be found in the list proposed by Tony Feldman (1997, 4). Terry Flew (2008), on
the other hand, repeats many of the properties identified so far, adding convergence,
cyberspace, and participation, among others (21‒37). I draw attention to these repetitions
because they indicate those attributes of new media that various scholars almost unanimously
accept. Their theories complement and ultimately build a shared picture of new media.
The properties most often invoked in theoretical reflections on media can be used to
construct a proposed set/matrix of features defining the new media environment. These are:
digitality (numerical representation/code, modularity, automation, variability, cultural
transcoding), interactivity, hypertextuality, virtuality, immersivity, networking, simulation,
interface, hypermediality, database, information, media convergence, and participation. I
would also add to these the qualities I pointed to earlier as being related to telecommunications
media, i.e., telecommunicativity, telematicity, mobility, and locativity, with processuality, and
performativity accompanying them in the background. This set, composed on the basis of
representative new media theories, brings together both the direct attributes of new media and
the qualities that define the parameters of their experience. All of them together form a matrix
of new media concepts ‒ a set of basic properties that we find in different configurations in
different types of new media. They also constitute the foundation for the developing art of new
media. Just as in the case of new media themselves new media art also treats this matrix of
properties as a source from which, different sets of properties of various types of new media
are grouped in different configurations and rankings.
As Manovich’s concept shows, the properties of new media are also the properties of new
media objects, including artworks. Manovich addresses his concept in parallel or
simultaneously with both new media and new media art. Other scholars of new media art and
its subdivisions, such as computer, digital or interactive art ‒ sometimes treated (erroneously,
I believe) as being synonymous with “new media art.” (Tribe and Jana, 2006, 6) ‒ characterize
these subdivisions as well by means of properties taken from the new media matrix. At the
same time, however, they also complement them with other characteristics either derived from
or closely related to it. Thus, for example, Heide Hagebölling, uses the following characteristics
to define “interactive multimedia dramaturgy”: nonlinearity, spatial orientation, hypermedial
structures,
navigation,
interface,
interactivity,
individual
reception/action,
multimediality/intermediality, networking, openness, and hybridity. We can find in this list
three features belonging to the new media matrix ‒ interactivity, hypermediality, and interface
– and others derived from it, such as nonlinearity or openness. She also enumerates
characteristics related to the experience of new media, such as individual reception, and
navigation (Hagebölling, 2004, 1‒8). Hope and Ryan (2014) or Colson (2007) follow the same
path. It is worth noting that all of these researchers indicate the complex and diverse nature of
the art being analyzed, and write about its hybridity (Hagebölling; Colson) and
interdisciplinarity (Hope and Ryan). This clearly demonstrates that the multifaceted nature of
new media art (which I view as an essential conceptual component) is implicit to theoretical
discourses about it.
New media art has developed around modern media technologies, exploiting them and
assuming their properties, merging them with qualities of traditional art, while at the same time
remaining in a close relationship with science and maintaining equally significant relationships
with other non-artistic and non-scientific fields of social practice. Tribe and Jana (2006), who
define new media art as “projects that make use of emerging media technologies and are
concerned with the cultural, political, and aesthetic possibilities of these tools” (6), have also
pointed to its transgressive character. The word “new” in the term “new media art” does not,
as I would like to emphasize once again, function as a temporal denominator, but speaks to its
distinctiveness; the category “new media art” should therefore be treated in its entirety as a
proper name, one that refers to phenomena which possess, at least to some extent, the
previously indicated characteristics.
The history and types of new media art
In 1948, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine. In it, he introduced a new scientific discipline
‒ cybernetics. His second book in this field, The Human Use of Humans Beings. Cybernetics
and Society, published two years later, resonated strongly in the social sciences and humanities,
as well as in artistic circles. Nicolas Schöffer, for example, was fascinated by it. The ideas
developed by Wiener and his followers have had a major impact on many different fields of
knowledge and social practice, ranging from electronic engineering, computer science, and
control systems, to sociology and communication theory. They have also played an extremely
important role in the transformation of art, opening up a number of completely new
perspectives for it.
Firstly, cybernetics created a framework for understanding the relationship between artistic
creation and scientific activity, a relationship that developed in a technological context (this
context would later take the form of an environment shaped by the interaction of digital
information, telecommunications, and robotic technologies). A model of artistic creation was
developed around cybernetics that combined science, engineering and art into a system of
mutual references. At the centre of this system was the category of feedback, fundamental to
cybernetics. As a result, scientists such as William Grey Walter, W. Ross Ashby and Gordon
Pask found themselves working in the same field as artists, often working on related issues:
Nicolas Schöffer, Edward Ihnatowicz, Roy Ascott. Some of them, such as Pask and Ihnatowicz,
displayed in their creative activities a range of interests, competences and goals that were
common to both art and science, making them perfect examples of the third culture postulated
by C.P. Snow (1956). Many of these individuals met in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary
Art in London as participants of the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition organized by Jasia
Reichardt.
Furthermore, the dialogue between art and cybernetics led to the emergence of the
cybernetic art movement. Its origins can be seen in the work of the French artist of Hungarian
origin Nicolas Schöffer, whose kinetic sculpture CYSP-1 from 1956 (CYSP is a combination
of the first letters of two basic determinants of this sculpture: CYbernétique and
SPatiodynamique ‒ cybernetic and spatial-dynamic) may be considered the first work of
cybernetic art. Having grown conceptually and structurally out of the mechanism of feedback,
Schöffer’s artwork reacted to events within its environment, entering into dialogic interactions
with audience members and its environment as a whole. In this way, cybernetic art became one
of the most important sources of interactive art. At the same time, developmental shifts in the
control mechanisms constitutive of cybernetic art towards artificial intelligence systems and a
resulting increase in works’ autonomy continued to transform cybernetic art into robotic art
and further into artificial intelligence art (AI art).
Lastly, the development of cybernetic art represented a powerful challenge for aesthetics
and art theory. The artworks created within its framework acquired the status of autonomous,
automated subjects of action, the sources of whose activity was located within their own
structure. Works created by cybernetic artists carried out performative actions in response to
stimuli from their environment (sounds, light, movement). Artifacts, hitherto stable in their
organization, became processes, joining the circle of time-based arts in the wake of kinetic art.
Moreover, unlike kinetic art, they were autonomous in their behavior. They thus forsook the
idea of representation, so characteristic of the visual arts, in favor of the concept of selfrepresentation.
For aesthetics, it was not only the new status of the artwork characterizing cybernetic art
that was revolutionary, but the fact that, as a result of this change, we, as the viewers of a work,
became at the same time the objects of its perception (or detection), which itself possessed a
disruptive dimension that threatened to upset the existing aesthetic milieu. A further
consequence of the cybernetic transformation of the concept of a work of art was a consequent
transformation of the structure, properties and reference of aesthetic experience, which lost its
hitherto contemplative character, acquiring in its place the structure of an event in which
viewers become participants. Grounding the character of experience in feedback means that
the addressee’s actions also take place within the spectrum of its reference, alongside the
performance of the artifact. The reactions of the audience become part of the work, constituted
by the relations between the event’s component parts, and arising within the space in which
they occur. The distance separating the viewer from the work of art, which is so characteristic
of the aesthetic experience in its traditional formulation, and which situates both parties in
essentially separate worlds, thus disappears. In cybernetic art, the work of art and its addressee
form a single, complex, hybrid whole. Jack Burnham proposed the concept of system aesthetics
in response to the dialogue between art and cybernetics, believing it to be the most appropriate
method for analyzing the transformation of an object-oriented art culture into a processoriented one (Burnham, 1968a, 30‒35).
By abandoning representation in favor of self-presentation, cybernetic art simultaneously
replaced an anthropocentric perspective with a robotic one. By making robots a model for a
work of art, it had chosen the notion and task of creating life instead of representing it. The
adopted robotic model and the resulting creative context mean that we are dealing here with a
vision of post-biological life. It also problematises the traditional humanist stance and, further,
heralds the inclusion of cybernetic art in the process of constructing post- or trans-humanist
orders.
I consider robotic art to be an extension or perhaps a direct transformation of cybernetic
art, as I have already mentioned. However, the above observations lead us to stake out even
more far-reaching horizons for cybernetic art. It is possible to see its continuations in the form
of an art of artificial ecosystems, an art of artificial life, bio-cybernetic art and bio-robotic art.
The latter, in turn, also forces us to speak of its opening up to bioart and other forms of biomedia
art. Rooted in the radical transformations of art in the latter half of the 20th century, and
initiating or co-creating numerous neo-avant-garde tendencies, cybernetic art built the
foundations for the further development of new media art.
Apart from cybernetic art, the second type of new media art appearing at the beginning of
its history was oscilloscope art. The first such works appeared as early as 1950, thanks to Ben
Laposky and Peter Keetman. The specific character of works of this kind, which integrate two
different art media in cooperation, should be particularly noted. The images generated on the
screen of an oscilloscope are then recorded with a photographic camera, as seen in the case of
the two artists mentioned above, or with a film camera, and only in this final, hybrid form are
made available to the public. Films using oscilloscopes were made by Norman McLaren, Hy
Hirsh, and Mary Ellen Bute. Oscilloscope art developed in a transmedial and transdisciplinary
space, involving technoscience as a partner in the latter dimension. Things were no different in
the case of cybernetic art, where, in addition to its interaction with science (cybernetics), we
also observe the constitutive relations of the cybernetic medium with other art media: with
kinetic art and sculpture (Burnham, 1968b). All three factors of new media art – newmediality,
transmediality, and transdisciplinarity – have thus been present in this field and its genres from
the very beginning of its history.
The following decade witnessed the beginnings of computer art, initially in the form of
graphics and animation, and later computer-designed sculptures as well. Here, too, the
computer medium functioned in cooperation with other art media. The new media art that arose
out of these interactions emerged out of their close ties to computer science and the
technosciences. And not only because they were essentially dependent on scientific and
technical development. Many works considered to be early examples of computer art were
created by scientists-turned-artists like Herbert W. Franke, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Hiroshi
Kawano, Frieder Nake and Georg Ness, whose laboratory or university research activity played
a direct or indirect role in their genesis. In the United States, the scientific and engineering
communities played an extremely important role in this regard; an important source of early
computer art was Bell Laboratories, where Charles Csuri, Bela Julesz, Ken Knowlton, A.
Michael Noll, Lillian Schwartz, Edward Zajec, and others worked. Works by Julesz and Noll
were featured during the first exhibition of computer art in the United States, titled “ComputerGenerated Pictures”, held April 8‒24, 1965 at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Artists
from scientific circles were subsequently displayed alongside artists who had practiced
traditional artistic disciplines before entering the world of computer-generated new media art,
such as Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnár or Roman Verostko. Together, these artists formed a circle
referred to by Verostko as the algorists. Parallel to this work in the visual and audiovisual arts,
experiments were also being carried out at that time in the field of computer music and literature
(Dietrich, 1986).
Video synthesis art was being developed alongside computer animation by artists such as
Stephen Beck, Nam June Paik, Dan Sandin, Woody and Stein Vasulka, initially using analogue
and later digital devices – synthesizers. From a contemporary perspective, three types of new
media art can be identified here: oscilloscope art, computer animation, and video synthesis art.
These are often seen as a single area of artistic practice, just as cybernetic art is often combined
with certain varieties of robotic art.
In the following years, further types of new media art emerged. These were rooted both in
the dynamic development of media technologies and in the increasing number of
transformations of new media forms and the development of their connections with both other
kinds of art and with non-artistic fields of social practice. To conclude this section, I would like
to list the most important types of new media art (and their forerunners), that is, those most
often indicated in reflections on this area of practice. I have organized them on the basis of
their status and the functions they perform in the world of new media art.
1. Forerunners:
Kinetic Art, Process Art, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, Art & Technology.
Although these types of art do not belong to the field of new media art, I refer to them here
because they preceded it (logically, not necessarily chronologically) and were instrumental in
its development. They are, in a sense, present in new media art because they all share certain
fundamental properties: they challenged the object status of the artwork, transformed it into an
event, emphasized the causal significance of the viewer (collaboration and participation), and
highlighted the importance and role of technology in art.
2. Media-based:
Oscilloscope Art, Robotic Art, Bio-Robotic Art; Holographic Art, Laser Art, Video Processing
Art, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM Art, Virtual Reality Art, Augmented Reality Art, Cave Art,
Video Game Art, Machinima Art, Internet Art (Mail Art, ASCII Net Art, Web Art, Browser
Art, Virus Art, Social Media Art).
These types are rooted in a specific new technical medium or intermedium, and their basic
properties are linked to the specific, unique characteristics of a given new media environment.
3. Attributes-based:
Cybernetic Art, Bio-Cybernetic Art, Telecommunication Art, Generative Art, Evolutionary
Art, Interactive Art, Hypermedia Art, Networked Art, Mobile Media Art, Locative Media Art,
Sound Art, Artificial Intelligence Art, Artificial Life Art, Bioart, Genomic Art, Transgenic Art,
Nanoart.
The types grouped together here are all organized around the basic characteristics defining
them. An artwork assigned to a particular genre may also belong to other genres linked to
specific media (interactive art, for example, may include works from VR Art, Video Game Art
or Internet Art, as well as interactive installations, interactive films, or forms of interactive
theater or architecture). The tendencies that developed most intensively within these new media
art genres grouped here were those that utilized and developed its most transgressive aspects:
transmedial and transdisciplinary.
4. Metamedia:
Computer Art, Digital Art, Electronic Art.
I refer to these as metamedia. Their media properties provide the foundation for many other
types of new media art, which means that within each type, there are works belonging to
numerous new media art genres, such as Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Digital
Video, Electronic Literature.
5. Function-based:
Software Art, Glitch Art, Tactical Media Art, Hacktivism.
The types I have assigned to this group have been selected both for their aesthetics and for their
strategies and objectives.
The differences found among and within all these different types of genres are also essentially
produced by the relationship between the three defining aspects of new media art:
newmediality, transmediality, and transdisciplinarity. These interrelationships not only give
rise to new media art, and shape its history, but also define specific types of new media art and
individual artworks.
The main factors of new media art
The active presence of new media in social contexts has initiated numerous and profound
cultural changes, including those taking place in the field of art. Transgressivity, hybridity,
transmediality, and transdisciplinarity are among the aspects of contemporary artistic culture
where the emergence of new media technologies has played a key role. Considering the
genesis, properties, and socio-cultural circulation of new media, I distinguish three factors of
the field of new media art: newmediality, transmediality, and transdisciplinarity. Their mutual
interactions gave rise to new media art and shaped its history. The order in which I discuss
them here is logical rather than chronological: there is no temporal order in these artistic
practices. We can only speak of the dominance of certain attitudes and related tendencies in
particular periods or particular works, which may influence the visibility of particular factors
and their hierarchies at a given moment.
Newmediality
When we consider new media art exclusively in terms of this first aspect – its newmediality –
we look solely at how it was shaped through the use of new technical media. They are the
source of both the tools that shape new media art, and the basic attributes and aesthetics that
define it. All technical media interact with each other. Within this process, newmediality comes
closer to a second factor: transmediality. This rapprochement, expanding but also intensifying
and differentiating, the various dimensions of newmediality, yields desirable consequences for
new media art, as new and valuable artistic possibilities emerge, including, new structures
(such as networked VR) and properties associated with them (such as collective immersivity).
The dynamics of artistic processes dominated by new media are shaped, on the one hand,
by artists’ analyses of media and their various uses or overuses of it, and, on the other, by
scientific and technical inventions that have impacted the world of new media. Here, in turn,
the factor of newmediality is supplemented by a third, transdisciplinary factor.
The claim that the first creators of computer art came from the world of science has its
justification in the fact that the development of new media art has been, in the context of
newmediality, driven by technical-media inventions and their increasing availability.
Computers, before they entered the world of art, had found a home in the world of science,
where, in their interactions with scientists, they unexpectedly generated processes of not only
scientific, but also artistic value (these processes opened up a new chapter in the
transdisciplinary relations between art and science). Advancements in the field of digital
technology, which have contributed to the development of and diversification within the field
of new media and their social impact, have had also an enormous impact on the development
and transformation of new media art.
Newmediality is the reason that successive technoscientific and media inventions, as well
as their evolution and increasing capabilities, have played such a key role in the rapid
development of new media art and in the formation of new types and trends within it. In various
periods of its history, certain technologies have attracted particular interest and attention from
artists, either because of the new artistic and research perspectives they opened up, or because
of the perceived possibilities they offered for opening up new realms for creative exploration.
Numerous inventions within this discipline – multiple interfaces, data recording and
compression technologies, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies, broadband Internet
and the World Wide Web, machine learning and artificial intelligence – these have all
stimulated waves of interest among progressive artists, leading to the development of new types
of new media art and influencing which forms achieved momentary domination within this
dynamic field. Interactive art, installations using various forms of data recording, virtual art,
Internet art, generative art – all of these emerged as much as a result of the development of
artistic ideas as due to the availability of certain tools and technological possibilities.
The artistic significance of different types of new media art have changed over time along
with the advancement of technology. Virtual reality art, for example, which in the 1990s
aroused the interest of many outstanding artists, such as Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang
Strauss, Brenda Laurel, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Scroggins, Char Davies, Eduardo Kac,
Ulrike Gabriel, and which resulted in a number of important works, faded from view in the
following decade, only to return now with intensified force in the works of numerous artists of
various ages. Additionally this art has also become networked (Internet VR art has appeared)
and has contributed to increasing interest in the art of Augmented Reality, all thanks to the
great strides made in technological advancement.
The dynamic nature of the transformation of this new media art factor, which is expressed
in the transformations technical new media have undergone and in the expansion and
intensification of the relations that connect them, also underlies the developments that have
taken place in its other factors. In turn, the intensification of the processes through which
transmediality and transdisciplinarity are expressed, the constant search for new possibilities
for using newmediality for specific artistic purposes, strengthens the position and importance
of the latter in the world of new media art. All three factors together – and multiplicity,
diversity, and the effectiveness of their interrelationships – determine the dynamics of
development and the social position of the overall field of new media art.
Transmediality
The notion of transmediality ‒ the second factor considered here ‒ conflicts to some extent
with the category of postmedia, commonly found in discussions of new media art and
contemporary art. In order to properly present the nature, role and significance of the
transmediality factor of new media art, it is also necessary to look at the concept of
postmediality and the mutual relations linking these concepts.
The concept of postmediality has been the subject of a variety of analyses by numerous
researchers (see, for example, Krauss, 1999; Apprich, Berry Slater, Iles, Lerone Schultz, 2013;
Chierico, 2016). It is sometimes used, like Quaranta (2013) does, as a tool for undermining the
significance and status of new media art categories (17‒18). New media culture or media in
general, as Peter Weibel (2006) puts it, would, within this research perspective, give way to
postmedia culture. But what in fact are postmedia? Quaranta and Weibel, in spite of the
apparent affinity between their attitudes and their both proclaiming the birth of the postmedia
era, the two clearly differ in their assessment of the importance of new media in relation to
other components of the postmedia world.
What I call the transmedia factor of new media art – with this category supplanting the
notion of postmedia – is somewhat similar to the way in which this latter term is defined by its
promoters. I juxtapose these two concepts here to show what the categories of postmedia and
transmedia have in common and what divides them. Weibel writes about the mixing and
blending of media as the foundation of the postmedia condition of the art world. I also see
artistic transmedia as a result of the convergence, mixing, and hybridization of traditional
media art, technical media art, and new media art, as well as a comparative levelling in terms
of the importance and rank of these three areas. However, unlike researchers who regard
postmedia as a phenomenon belonging exclusively to the field of art, I also see in transmedia
the result of a process which has taken place in the media environment as such, i.e. technical
means of communication. And what is more important, I do not see in transmediality a process
or formation which has emerged to replace new media art, whether in a chronological or logical
sense, as Quaranta sees postmedia art. I interpret transmediality as a factor of new media art,
one that has co-created it from the very beginning of its history. I have pointed this out in my
analysis of cybernetic art and oscilloscope art. Transmediality has now spread throughout
contemporary art, which has grown significantly closer in character to new media art.
We can consider the issue of transmedia from two perspectives: that of the media
(technological) environment and that of the art world. With regard to the former, the concept
of transmedia needs to be considered in relation to two issues.
Firstly, transmedia no longer refers to individual media, but to complex media
environments in which, as an element of wider convergence processes, media have come
together to form a complex whole, offering a set of properties and possibilities that were once
dispersed among individual media. On the other hand, as a result of the development of the
divergence processes that accompany convergence, transmedia are breaking up into numerous
differentiated environments which function in a variety of parallel creative and communicative
processes, differently from the individual media they superseded. These divergence processes
co-create the platform and principle I wrote about earlier, i.e., that individual new media can
only embody some of the properties that together characterize a holistically conceived new
media environment. The divergent world of art offers each of its elements the possibility of
being an example of the whole.
Convergence is accompanied by a process of remediation, that is, moving in the same
direction, ultimately, towards a media synthesis (Bolter, Grusin, 1999). In this way,
convergence also embraces not just new media, but old media as well. However, it is the
emergence of new media, their properties, and the tensions they have introduced into the media
system that have dialogized and dynamized the whole system, triggering processes of remedial
hybridization. The properties I have termed the new-media matrix, or the new media as such,
have turned out to be a source of transformation of both the media system overall and its sociocultural environment, initiating multidirectional processes in which old media became new,
and new media discovered their sources and sometimes their current inspirations, in the old.
Secondly, transmediality is accompanied by a universality of access, ease of use, and the
obviousness of applying media technological possibilities (ubiquitous computing), which shifts
the focus from media and their challenges and technical possibilities, to the cultural
consequences of their social functioning and their interaction with a diverse environment.
Contemporary social media saturation strips new media of the magic once felt in them, shifting
our attention to what we gain from their use.
Things are no different with transmediality in the art world. Here, too, we are dealing with
a fusion of media, this time of art media. The hybridization of art media combines traditional
media, such as painting or sculpture, with technical media: photography, radio, film, video, and
new media, whether interactive or virtual, networked or geolocative. However, unlike the
media order, where the old media are adapted to the cybercultural reality of the new media, in
the art world, it is the new media that are to be ennobled and then mixed with the old ‒
traditional ‒ media. It is in this way, through integration, that they become linked to both
traditional media and the art world. At least this is how it looks from the perspective of the
artistic mainstream. From a new media point of view, this more of a process of “modernizing”
the traditional art world. However, if we refrain from privileging either side, we can say that
what we are dealing with in this process is the reconciliation of two diverse, different visions
of art.
In fact, the fusing of technical media and traditional media characterizes the whole history
of technical media art. This process began with photography, which sought to gain acceptance
for its artistic aspirations through an association with painting and drawing, thereby smuggling
into the world of art disguised as a medium that was already present in it (pictorial
photography). Thus, in the world of artistic creation a specific mode arose for developing the
art of technical media. As a result, they acquired a two-plane structure. On the first, we find
properties, structures and forms resulting from the technological conditions available in
technical media art. On the second are properties taken from the traditional arts, i.e. those that
are generally engaged in interactions with the attributes of technical media. These interactions
are constitutive of the artistic status of the work. A dialogue between these two spheres usually
defines the aesthetics of works produced in this mode.
Such a duality invariably continues in technological art today. And although it takes on a
different form nowadays ‒ the technical character of art media no longer arouses particular
controversy, and art itself seems to remain in a symbiotic relationship with technology ‒ this
principle continues to remain relevant. Lev Manovich, for example, in characterizing new
media art, drew attention to how its properties are configured, which is particularly important
in terms of its aesthetic character. New media art has, in his opinion, a similarly two-layered
character. The first layer consists of cultural determinants, such as, encyclopedia, short story,
plot, composition, point of view, mimesis, and catharsis. The second layer includes aspects and
components derived from computer technology: process, packet, sorting, matching, function,
variable, computer language, and data structure (Manovich, 2001, 46). As a result, a specific
form of computer art (and culture) emerges: a synthesis of cultural attributes and meanings and
computer properties, traditional humanistic rules for modeling the world, and computing
principles and resources that achieve this in their own distinct way.
We can therefore say that technical media art, in the broad sense of the term (media and
new media art), is usually or most often shaped by the interaction of specific media and new
media characteristics that take on artistic properties, thus embodying an integrative dialogue
between technology and culture.
Transmediality is an extremely important factor of new media art. Newmediality is
characterized by its creative instrumentarium, and is present both in the structure of art works
and, in particular, in their experience. The transmedia factor, on the other hand, apart from
enriching and broadening the spectrum of a work’s properties, and its artistic and aesthetic
potential, also overcomes the seclusion imposed on it by newmediality, reduces the distance
separating it from the old technical media, and opens it up to interaction with traditional, nontechnical media, without giving up anything that has characterized and distinguished it thus
far.
Transmediality is more than just a defining factor of new media art. It is the means by
which the world of artistic creation is linked with new and traditional art media. But we are not
talking here about attaching one to the other, let alone subordinating one to the other. Their
interactions lead to the emergence of a new common plane, one that is transgressive and hybrid,
potentially integrating the world of artistic creation as a whole. Thus, in a sense, it plays the
role ascribed to the post-media perspective, but without the mistakes that were made there.
Transdisciplinarity
Whereas transmediality is grounded in intra-artistic relations, in particular, those with technical
media and between traditional artistic types, transdisciplinarity broadens the set of interacting
disciplines and undermines the boundaries between them. Transdisciplinarity emerges as a
result of the processes of deconstruction and transgression, which disrupt not only the previous
artistic order, but the cultural system as a whole. Earlier visions of the institutional order are
deconstructed, and individual fields of social practices merged. As a result, transgression
becomes a fundamental process in the building of a new cultural order.
The transgressive dimension of artistic practices brings about a weakening, undermining or
questioning, or even an abolition, of the boundaries marking the culturally defined territories
of art. Yet, this concerns more than just the borders between art disciplines. These began to be
undermined in the 19th century, and were essentially invalidated by the historical avant-gardes
and neo-avant-gardes in the following century. What we are talking about here are the
boundaries between art and the environment within which it operates. These were also
undermined by the most radical avant-garde trends, but it was transdisciplinary art that
ultimately made them irrelevant. The numerous forms of transgression occurring in artistic
work today have abolished the borders separating art from other fields of practice, putting it in
direct relations with other spheres of social life and the concepts, methods of action, tools and
products characteristic of them, opening up new possibilities for art. Transgression thus
supports a deconstructive posture, joining it as a key factor in the hybridization of art.
Borrowing from Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on contemporary post-identity forms of
community (1993), I can say that through its manifold transgressions, art has lost its former
identity, grounded in common properties, which had already been systematically weakened by
avant-garde activities, ultimately becoming an open field in which every work proposed and
accepted by art institutions is an example.
Deconstruction and transgression have turned out to be two aspects of the same complex
process of transformation, one in which art is parting with its inherited identity and opening up
for itself a horizon of new, open creative possibilities.
In the vast field of new media art, where transdisciplinarity plays a decisive, constitutive
role, I identify two tendencies that I consider particularly important for its contemporary face:
SciArt and critical art. Both are founded at the interaction of all three factors of new media art.
Both of them also involve artistic research, treating the creative process not only as a means
of creating specific products/works that evoke artistic experiences; in this case, creative
processes and their products/works of art are also a means of creating knowledge. Both aspects
of the work created in this mode – artistic and cognitive – are closely related, constituting an
inseparable whole. In some cases, this process of knowledge creation also involves its
addressees. Knowledge is then created collectively and dispersed or distributed in character.
Audience participation may occur at the stage of the creation of a work or during its reception
in the form of participatory experience.
The history of SciArt overlaps with the history of new media art. Since the very formation
of the new media paradigm, it has been intensively building the relations between art and
science. One might even say that new media art was born out of these interactions, and not only
because it emerged from research into communication and media theory. A very interesting
early illustration of this is a series of projects by Sherrie Rabinovitz and Kit Galloway produced
under the common title Aesthetics Research in Telecommunications (1975‒77); equally
interesting later examples, resulting from further developments in telecommunication
technologies, are provided by the work of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss,
including Energy Passages (2004), Media Flow (2008), and Performing the Archive (2007).
Other fields of science, such as mathematics and computer science, were also present here from
the very beginning, providing the basis for the growth of algorithmic works. These included
graphics and computer animation by Herbert W. Franke, Frieder Nake, and Georg Ness, and
cybernetics (otherwise parallel to communication theory), from which a dialogue emerged that
led to the first creative currents of the new media age: cybernetic and robotic art, the works of
Nicolas Schöffer, Edward Ihnatowicz, and later those of Simon Penny, Bill Vorn and Chico
MacMurtrie. These early manifestations of art’s interaction with science, initiated in the 1950s
and 1960s, were simultaneously embedded in the context of engineering and technological
knowledge and practice. Subsequent relations between art and science moved even further into
the world of science, reaching towards such research areas as the life sciences, neurology,
genetics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. The SciArt trend thus marks a vast and
extremely diverse realm of contemporary artistic practice, symptomatic of the contemporary
world. The numerous tendencies that constitute it, such as bioart, neuroart, biorobotic art,
nanoart, and artificial life art, are characterized by their deep transdisciplinary hybridity. The
number of artists who should be mentioned here is immeasurable. I will only mention by way
of exemplification (in alphabetical order) artists such as Guy Ben-Ary, Oron Catts and Ionat
Zurr, Harold Cohen, Joe Davis, Ken Feingold, Ulrike Gabriel, Eduard Kac, Marion LavalJeantet, Jill Scott, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Stelarc, Robertina
Šebjanič, Paul Vanouse and Victoria Vesna.
While developing its interaction with science, art has remained heavily engaged in the
humanities, in particular cultural studies and social studies. Art is increasingly focused on
reflecting on such issues as contemporary socio-cultural orders, the Anthropocene and ecology,
migration, nationalism and totalitarianism, human rights, racism and exclusion, violence and
civic self-organization. Artists assume both an analytical and critical stance at the same time,
bringing invisible political processes and relations to the surface, undertaking deconstructive,
subversive, critical actions in their art, the results of which lend support to underprivileged or
persecuted social groups and sustain hope for social change. This is why I have chosen the
category of critical art to describe this field of new media transdisciplinary art. Another term
that could be used here is new media artivism.
The concept of critical art was already functioning earlier in reflections on contemporary
art, irrespective of the context of transdisciplinarity and new media art indicated here.
However, it is only within this framework that we can discern the qualities that most fully
define this current. Earlier considerations of the notion of critical art made reference to Michel
Foucault and pointed to the subversive but also analytical character of both critical art and the
techniques it used. Directing attention to the transdisciplinarity of critical art brings out its
structural and cultural dimension, not only its newmediality and transmediality, but also its
transgressiveness and hybridity, thus placing it within the broader framework of processes that
characterize contemporaneity.
Critical transdisciplinary art makes free use of transmedia tendencies, developed in the
context of new media art, to mix technical and traditional media. The works created as a result
of this strategy are very diverse in genre and character. As in the case of the previously cited
works from the field of ArtSci, works from the circle of critical art display a wide variety of
creative strategies. Differences between artists’ creative stances concern not only the media
used and the topics addressed, but also their working methods.
Lynn Hershman’s interactive installation Room of One’s Own (1990‒1993) explores the
issues of voyeurism, surveillance, and social domination. In making reference to the works of
Virginia Woolf, the artist invites the audience to participate in a performance in the form of a
peep show, where a woman is turned into an object to be watched and controlled. Participation
in this patriarchal staging initiates a subversive analysis of the orders of power, discrimination,
and exclusion.
Simon Robertshaw in The Order of Things (1996) addresses issues related to biological
determinism, biopower, eugenics, and its contemporary continuations. He analyzes the
methods that science creates to determine people’s ways of perceiving themselves and reality,
as well as the consequences that emerge from this. She combines photographs, video
projection, and interactive objects in a vast hybrid work, offering viewers the opportunity to
analyze their own perceptions and understand them critically.
Luz María Sánchez has dedicated her work, a mobile phone application linked to a
customized website, Vis. [un]necessary force_3 (2017‒2021), and made it available to its direct
users: the Rastreadoras group in Mexico, who are searching for the remains of their kidnapped
and murdered loved ones. This audiovisual cyber-cartographic work is both a commemoration
of the victims and a tool ‒ a database for the construction of memory, oral and audiovisual
history. The data collected during the search expeditions are scientifically systematized here.
The work also serves to empower the participants and strengthen their sense of community.
Vis. [un]necessary force_3 is a transdisciplinary, collaborative artwork that builds on the
foundation of ongoing research. In the works of Sánchez, as in the case of some other artists,
critical approach and SciArt tendency merge with each other.
In the examples used in my considerations in this part of the paper, only a few of the new
media artworks displaying transdisciplinary tendencies are situated in the field of critical art.
However, many artists are active in this field, just as in the case of SciArt. They have created
works that are diverse in terms of both media and structure. Shu Lea Cheang, Gina Czarnecki,
Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, VNS Matrix, and The Yes Men
are only a few of the artists active in this field, with their activity reflecting its diversity.
Thanks to its transdisciplinarity, the new media art enters into significant relations with
other, non-artistic disciplines of social practice, such as science, the humanities, politics, and
social activism. The only possible form of such integration is the emergence of a new plane of
cooperation, and the formation of new languages, methods of action, values and aesthetics.
Transgressiveness and hybridity reach here their highest level of complexity.
Conclusion
All three factors and their associated orders: newmediality, transmediality, and
transdisciplinarity, together with the currents, tendencies, and attitudes which emerge as a
result of them, jointly define the area of art organized around new media, where the relations
between artistic creation, technology, science, humanities, political and social activism play a
constitutive role. These factors do not constitute successive stages or phases in the development
of new media art, however. As shown by the first chronological currents ‒ cybernetic art and
oscilloscope art ‒ these factors have invariably accompanied each other from the very
beginning of its history, creating together a comprehensive, defining framework for new media
art. I consider the co-presence and mutual interaction of all three factors to be the basic
determinant of this field. These essential, defining connections also make artistic research the
most characteristic and most valuable artistic practice in this field. Moreover, the creative
potential of new media art, and the spheres of reflection and creative practice that arise from
these three integrated, defining factors, make it one of the most important fields of activity for
contemporary artists today.
For a very long time in its history, new media art drew its progressive impulses and driving
forces primarily from the milieu of independent artists, rather than from the institutional art
world. Of course, technological and scientific progress and the development of the media also
played an important role here, but mainly in defining the available possibilities for creative
choices and in creating environments for their realization, rather than for endowing them with
a transformational character and path of development. This situation, however, seems to have
changed somewhat in the last decade, due to the deepening autonomy of technologies and
newly available intelligent (and in their own artificial way, living) tools, which lead us ponder
anew the status, character, place, and role of art and creative processes in the context of this
transforming reality. An important role here is also played by the increasing opening up of the
institutional art world towards new media art. Technology, even in the form of NFTs, is gaining
increasing importance, and new media art is playing the role of an avant-garde inspirer and
active participant in these events. Meanwhile, it is also a critical/research agency that reflects
on their course and on their various consequences, both for the sake of art and the world as a
whole.
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Tomás Mantecón
Universidad de Cantabria
Guilherme Moerbeck
UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Rio de Janeiro State University
Fabien Montcher
Saint Louis University
José Manuel Santos
University of Salamanca
