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New media

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New Media is a relatively new field of study that has developed around cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution.

New Media studies reflect on the social and ideological impact of the personal computer, computer networks, digital mobile devices, ubiquitous computing and virtual reality. The study includes researchers and propagators of new forms of artistic practices such as interactive installations, net art, software art, new interfaces for musical expression, the subsets of interaction, interface design and the concepts of interactivity, multimedia and remediation.

Media (the plural of medium) refer to technologies used to communicate messages and include mass media (newspapers, TV, radio), popular media (film, books) and digital media (computer games, the World Wide Web, virtual reality) and others.


Plural form refers as well to the variety of technologies and formats digital medium is taking.

"New" in this context means:

  • the relative novelty of digital computing
  • a belief in the computer as the future
  • the unprecedented speed of evolution and mutation of devices and technologies
  • undeveloped, imperfect and experimental environments
  • subjective novelty, most of the artists and theoreticians currently studying digital culture have migrated from different disciplines.

New media are also the common denominator of such disciplines as (new) media art (from Nam June Paik to net.art), (new) media activism, (new) media studies (from Marshall McLuhan to Lev Manovich) and journalistic media criticism (from Neil Postman to Howard Rheingold).

New Media Artists

Nam June Paik video artist, modified television set

Melinda Rackham "is a new media artist who publishes on the Internet. You have to interact with her work in order to appreciate the outcome. Rackham likes having the global reach of an Internet-based gallery" Time|CNN.

Ian Haig. His work Web Devolution "invites the viewer to point and click, while it parodies the digital utopia." Time|CNN.

Laurens Tan computer animation and sculpture

Charles Sandison works with digital projection, codes and installations

Online articles

  • Media-N the Online Journal of the New Media Caucus. The journal reflects current discourse in New Media art practice, theory and education.
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