Mark Tribe, Reena Jana: New Media Art (2006-)

Artists have always been early adopters of emerging media technologies, from Albrecht Dürer and the printing press in the 16th century to Nam June Paik’s video experiments in the 1960s. In 1994, the advent of the internet as a popular medium catalyzed a global art movement that began to explore the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of new communication technologies–the web, webcams and video surveillance cameras, wireless phones, hand-held computers, and GPS devices. This book addresses New Media art as a specific art historical movement, focusing on technologies, forms, thematic content and conceptual strategies. Often involving appropriation, collaboration, and shared ideas and expressions, New Media art frequently addresses issues of identity, commercialization, privacy, and public domain. Many New Media artists are profoundly aware of their historical antecedents, making reference to Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual art, Performance art, and Fluxus.

Featured artists: Cory Arcangel, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Vuk Cosic, Mary Flanagan, Ken Goldberg, Paul Kaiser and Shelly Eshkar, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Mouchette, MTAA, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Radical Software Group, Raqs Media Collective, RTMark, and John F. Simon Jr.

This open-source wiki book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. It is based on the manuscript of New Media Art, a book written by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana and published by Taschen in 2006. The Taschen book is available in French, German, Italian and Spanish in addition to English. This wiki book is not intended as a substitute or replacement for the Taschen book, but rather as an expandable educational resource to which artists, curators, students and others may contribute.

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