New media art
New media art involves complex curation and preservation practices that make collecting, installing, and exhibiting the works harder than most other mediums.
The origins of new media art can be traced to the moving image inventions of the 19th century such as the phenakistiscope (1833), the praxinoscope (1877) and Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope (1879).
Some early examples of performance artists who experimented with then state-of-the-art lighting, film, and projection include dancers Loïe Fuller and Valentine de Saint-Point.
Vostell's work influenced Nam June Paik, who created sculptural installations featuring hundreds of television sets that displayed distorted and abstract footage.
[5] Beginning in Chicago during the 1970s, there was a surge of artists experimenting with video art and combining recent computer technology with their traditional mediums, including sculpture, photography, and graphic design.
Many of the artists involved were grad students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, who co-founded the Video Data Bank in 1976.
Important thinkers in this regard have been Vannevar Bush and Theodor Nelson, whereas comparable ideas can be found in the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Julio Cortázar.
Non-linearity can be seen as an important topic to new media art by artists developing interactive, generative, collaborative, immersive artworks like Jeffrey Shaw or Maurice Benayoun who explored the term as an approach to looking at varying forms of digital projects where the content relays on the user's experience.
[19] Database aesthetics holds at least two attractions to new media artists: formally, as a new variation on non-linear narratives; and politically as a means to subvert what is fast becoming a form of control and authority.
New media art includes "explorations of code and user interface; interrogations of archives, databases, and networks; production via automated scraping, filtering, cloning, and recombinatory techniques; applications of user-generated content (UGC) layers; crowdsourcing ideas on social- media platforms; narrowcasting digital selves on "free" websites that claim copyright; and provocative performances that implicate audiences as participants".
[20] Afrofuturism is an interdisciplinary genre that explores the African diaspora experience, predominantly in the United States, by deconstructing the past and imagining the future through the themes of technology, science fiction, and fantasy.
Musician Sun Ra, believed to be one of the founders of Afrofuturism, thought a blend of technology and music could help humanity overcome the ills of society.
[23] Japanese artist Mariko Mori's multimedia installation piece Wave UFO (1999–2003) sought to examine the science and perceptions behind the study of consciousness and neuroscience.
[24] Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's (2008) immersive video installation Pour Your Body Out explores the dichotomy of beauty and the grotesque in the natural world and their relation to the female experience.
The large-scale 360-degree installation featured breast-shaped projectors and circular pink pillows that invited viewers to relax and immerse themselves in the vibrant colors, psychedelic music, and partake in meditation and yoga.
In Canada, Indigenous multidisciplinary artists like Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Kent Monkman have incorporated themes about gender, identity, activism, and colonization in their work.
[3] Due to the vast technical aspects involved no established digital preservation guidelines fully encompass the spectrum of new media art.
Through the construction of projects in various media, they acquire technical skills, practice vocabularies of critique and analysis, and gain familiarity with historical and contemporary precedents.
