Postmedia Art

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, non-artistic 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.

Originally presented at the International symposium, "Gift of Nam June Paik -Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces" on September 9, 2016, Korea (https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/59754/international-symposium-gift-of-nam-june-paik-8-reanimating-njp-nam-june-paik-s-interfaces/), the following paper is my foray into Nam June Paik's rich oeuvre whose implications in the age of 'post-medium (or post-media) condition' are becoming increasingly acute. It is being heavily revised and expanded for a journal article.
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Widely hailed as the so-called “father of video art,” Nam June Paik lives on.
What begs the question, however, is the sheer diversity of his entire oeuvre beyond video. On top of his famous video works, Paik’s artworks encompass music, performance, painting, sculpture, cinema, TV, laser, and digital- let alone everything that wanders between or (re)mixes them. Is this simply a tell-tale sign which proves Paik as one of those avant-garde artists- who poked their noses into virtually everything? Is this not the proof of his (and their) reign whose time has now clearly passed?
Sidestepping such an idée fixe, this paper seeks to offer a different reading. For, despite the frenzy born of his dizzying changes of media, Paik’s works seem to betray a striking degree of consistency (if not stability)- in terms of what I call “states of media” wherein mediation soon gives way to the sense of immediacy or “immediation.” Put differently, his artworks mark and embody varying degrees or states of media as what not simply mediates but fundamentally transmutates humans and nonhuman entities.
I will show how these states are coextensive with Paik’s persistent, if at times contradictory exploration of Time, particularly in terms of its irreversibility, aka ‘entropy.’ In so doing, I will try to revise the well-worn myth of Paik’s (putatively naïve) humanism or anthropocentrism- in favor of what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno call ‘Natural History (Naturgeschichte)’ in which Machine and Human age alike. This will help us to demonstrate how Paik’s oeuvre remain more relevant and perhaps contemporary than ever.

In the wake of <When Two Galaxies Merge>, contemporary Korean artist Yangachi's solo exhibition at Atelier Hermès, Seoul (9.8-11.22.2017 cf. https://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2621926/yangachis-when-two-galaxies-merge-at-atelier-hermes-seoul), I contributed this essay.

In contradistinction to the conventional way of describing him as a 'multimedia artist', or his works as another 'postmedia art', I tried to revisit his artistic oeuvre anew by foregrounding his consistent, otherwise familiar reference to 'cinema.'

The secret kernel at the heart of his works, I argue, concerns the deceptively simple question as to 'what happens AFTER the world has become a movie'?

Far from making his art works allegedly 'cinematic,' Yangachi's oeuvre embody another, arguably the most timely question-- 'where is the World then'?  (*This review is being revised and expanded in English for an essay article)