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New media art

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New Media Art is a generic term used to describe art related to, or created with, a technology invented or made widely available since the mid-20th Century. The term differentiates itself by its resulting cultural objects, which can be seen in opposition to those deriving from old media arts (i.e. traditional painting, sculpture, etc.) New Media concerns are often derived from the telecommunications, mass media and digital modes of delivery the artworks involve, with practises ranging from conceptual to virtual art, performance to installation. The term is generally applied to disciplines such as:


History

The origins of New Media Art can be traced to the moving photographic inventions of the late 19th Century such as the zoetrope (1834), the praxinoscope (1877) and Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope (1879). During the 1960s the divergence with the history of cinema came with the video art experiments of Nam June Paik, and multimedia performances of Fluxus. More recently, the term New Media has become closely associated with the term Digital Art, and has converged with the history and theory of computer-based practises.

Some important influences on New Media art have been the theories developed around hypertext, databases, and networks. Important thinkers in this regard have been Vannevar Bush and Theodor Nelson with important contributions from the literary works of Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. These elements have been especially revolutionary for the field of narrative and anti-narrative studies, leading explorations into areas such as non-linear and interactive narratives.

Concerns

Preservation

As the technologies used to deliver works of New Media art such as film, tapes, web browsers, software and operating systems become obsolete, New Media art faces serious issues around the challenge to preserve artwork beyond the time of its contemporary production.

Methods of preservation exist, including the translation of a work from an obsolete medium into a related new medium (see Digital Rosetta Stone (PDF)), the digital archiving of media (see archive.org and web.archive.org), and the use of emulators to preserve work dependent on obsolete software or operating system environments (see Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase, a report by Richard Rinehart for Rhizome.org).


It is unclear how New Media Art is related to Media art.

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