newmediaart-introduction.docVIP

New Media Art - Introduction Defining New Media art Jodi, 1995 In 1993, at the start of the dot com boom, two European artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, paid a visit to Californias Silicon Valley. When they returned home, they created , a Web-site-as-art-work whose scrambled green text and flashing images seem to deconstruct the visual language of the Web. Heemskerk and Paesmans remixed found images and HTML scripts much as Dada artists played with the photographic imagery and typography of magazines and newspapers. J changed the way many people think about the Internet, demonstrating that it didnt just provide a new way to publish information; it could also be an art medium like oil painting, photography, or video. Like other works of New Media art, exploited an emerging technology for artistic purposes. 1994 was a watershed year in the linked histories of media technology and digital culture. The Netscape Corporation introduced the first commercial Web browser, signaling the Internets transformation from a computer network used primarily by computer enthusiasts and academic researchers into a popular medium for personal communication, publishing, and commerce. Terms like the Net, the Web, cyberspace, and dot com soon became part of the international vernacular, and a major societal shift appeared to be underway?from industrial production to information economies, from hierarchical organizations to distributed networks, from local markets to global ones. The Internet meant different things to different people: to entrepreneurs, it was a way to get rich quick; to activists, it was a means of building grassroots support for political causes; to media magnates, it represented a new channel for distributing content. This last group used the term new media to describe digital publishing forms like CD-ROMs and the Web. To old media companies, these nascent technologies indicated a move away from traditional outlets, such as newspapers and television, to emerg