Where is the New Media Art Now?

This Make is a research exercise into early examples of web-based or Net Art that was part of a class activity for Week 4 of the 2018 version of Networked Narratives.

Published in 2006 New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Renna Jana profiled a collection of the forms of digital art that took advantage of what was then a relatively new medium for art, the World Wide Web.

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 such new communication technologies—the web, CCTV surveillance cameras, cell phones, hand-held computers, and GPS devices. Focusing on New Media art as a specific art historical movement, this book explores its technologies, thematic content and conceptual strategies.

For an appreciation of current digital art we will explore these foundational examples of digital, networked art. They represent a time of wild experimentation, new technologies, but also to see what could be done with much slower and less sophisticated internet. But also, we will examine the issues of how well digital art holds up over time, especially when many were created with technologies not currently available, or have themselves vanished. It also opens the door to question the ephemeral nature of digital art.

To look back into the internet past, we need the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a powerful tool that allows us to access previous versions of web sites, especially ones that are no longer even online.

At one time the authors shared the text of the book on a wiki at Brown University, but it is no longer available.

But because it was one time public and was visited by the Internet Archive’s “robot” (learn more how the archive works), we can use the Wayback Machine to retrieve the profiles that were part of the book via http://bit.ly/new-media-art-wikibook.

A project on tumblr was started to review the digital art profiled in the New Media Art book, to reveal if they were still available, if not to locate it in the Internet Archive, and as well to find what became of the artists behind them. See “Re New Media Art” at http://re-new-media-art.tumblr.com/

As of the writing here, 10 of the original 35 art pieces in New Media Art are reviewed on the tumblr site; in this Make you are taking on the challenge to help fill out the rest of the collection.

1. Pick one of the artist names listed in the open google doc http://bit.ly/re-new-media-art that links to a Wayback Machine search for the original content from the book. Learn as much about it as you can, by visiting other linked sites from the original, searching for the site/URL/artis in present time.
2. Indicate the work as “taken” by adding your twitter names after the title.
3. Gather the following info (much is in the Wikibook) See a example of a completed research:
   • Title of Art Work (as listed in the Wikibook)
   • Artist name(s) (listed in the Wikibook)
   • When it was original published on the web (listed in the Wikibook)
   • Technologies used (listed in the Wikibook)
   • Current URL (if still available online)
   • Link to Wikibook page (in Wayback Machine)
   • A brief summary of the piece, not just copied from the book (quotes are okay, but write your own analysis of the piece). Try to describe it sufficiently so a reader can understand the purpose and context of the work.
   • Screenshots that represent the work
   • Information on where the artist is now
4. Publish as a blog post in your blog. Use the URL as a response to this Make, and also add the link to the google doc where you placed your twitter name. Then you will get credit when it is added to the tumblr site.

Example for "Where is the New Media Art Now?":
https://richardsonpatrice4060.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/olia-ialina/

Olia Ialina