This document provides links and information related to new media art. It begins with a list of links for the Whitney Biennial, TEDx talks, and a video of sounds recorded on Jupiter. It then provides historical context on early computers and computer art. It discusses tools and precedents of new media art, including influences from Dada, Duchamp, and other artists. It also discusses qualities of digital media and provides examples of new media artworks and artists.

1. THIS WEEK’S LINKS:
• Whitney Biennial
• h,p://www.newyorker.com/online/mul8media/
2010/03/08/100308_audioslideshow_whitneybiennial
• TEDx
• h,p://www.streamonline.pl/transmisja‐tedx‐warsaw‐wyklady‐zapis/
• The Sound of Jupiter (amazing!)
• h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3fqE01YYWs

2. NEW MEDIA ART
ASP American Art and Visual Culture
Dr. Lori Kent
Spring 2010

3. 1950 – Engineering Research Associates built the ERA
1101, the first commercially produced computer.
1954 –Computer music performance at MoMA by the
computer music center at Columbia University.
1964 – Marshall McLuhan publishes “Understanding
Media”
1967 – Sony releases the PortaPak, the first portable
video camera
1970 – The exhibition “Software” at the Jewish Museum,
NYC, treats computer programming as a metaphor for
conceptual art.

4. TOOLS
Hardware and software…
servers, routers, PCs, database
applications, video and computer
games, wireless phones, surveillance
cameras, GPS, social networks, etc.

5. Vibeke Sorensen wrote in 1995
• First of all, there are qualities unique to digital
media. They include memory, computational
prowess, high bandwidth data transfer, and
high speed data transformation. It affects
most fields of science, commerce,
engineering, entertainment, and art. Being
digital, they share a common structure and
language, and are part of a continuum rather
than completely separate entities. The most
popular means for traversing this continuum is
the Internet, particularly the data
dissemination structure referred to as the
World Wide Web.

6. The old days were not so long ago!
• h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dZRNBmxm_E

7. NEW MEDIA PRECEDENTS

8. Who led the way?
Dada, Duchamp, Warhol, Marshall
McLuhan, Lichtenstein, Joan Jonas,
William Wegman, Bill Viola, Vito
Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Naim June
Paik, and many more….

9. What do computers do well?

10. Combine?

11. Hannah Hoch

12. h,p://www.sepiatown.com/

14. Copy?

15. Andy Warhol

17. The original is by Walker Evans
”Hale County Alabama” (1936)
Sherrie Levine “Aer Walker Evans” (1981)

18. Spread Data?

19. Your blog?

20. Focus on Idea?

21. Meirle Laderman Ukeles
h,p://freshkillspark.wordpress.com/2009/01/

22. Mark Napier
h,p://www.potatoland.org/landfill/

23. Mendi + Keith Obadike
h,p://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html

24. Experiment?

25. Man Ray

26. h,p://www.etsy.com/shop/mumbreeze

27. Back to last week…
Your million zloty on ETSY.com?

28. $4,323.45 USD
12335.21 pln

29. h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mvE‐Lgeke0&feature=PlayList&p=75F72B4DC91864D9&index=7
Mumbleboy

30. Collaborate?

31. h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKmb2S5Lt8Y&feature=PlayList&p=75F72B4DC91864D9&index=0

32. Douglas Davis
h,p://artport.whitney.org/collec8on/davis/
In 1995, the Whitney Museum acquired its first work of Internet art, Douglas Davis' The
World's First Collabora8ve Sentence. Commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery,
Bronx, New York, in conjunc8on with "Interac8ons," its 1994 survey exhibi8on of the
ar8st's work, Sentence is an ongoing textual and graphic performance on the World
Wide Web that is owned by the Whitney Museum but was maintained on the Lehman
website from 1994 ‐ 2005. The work was generously donated to the Whitney by
Barbara Schwartz in honor of Eugene M. Schwartz, her late husband, who together had
purchased the concept and a signed disk with recordings of the first days of the
Sentence. Visitors to the site may add their own contribu8ons to the Sentence ‐‐ there
are more than 200,000 to date, separated into twenty‐one "chapters," in dozens of
languages and with a remarkable range of images and graphics. Any subject may be
addressed, but no contribu8on can end with a period, as the Sentence is infinitely
expanding.

33. Participation?

34. Ctheory Mul8media – dynamic poetry – “Crosspurposes” h,p://ctheorymul8media.cornell.edu/issue1/menu2.html

35. Stanisława Drożdża at CSW Warszawa
h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtm9mlnPWGE

36. h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbyy5vSg8w8

37. “My Boyfriend Came back from the War.”
Olia Lialina's my boyfriend came back from the war captures the flavor of a complex
and personal situa8on in a presence that reveals an8cipa8on, anxiety, hopes,
mixed messages, and personality transforma8on, in what appears as a mixture of
said and unsaid expressions. The naviga8on scheme presents opportuni8es to
pursue mul8ple, intersec8ng threads, crea8ng a web of possible internal and
external conversa8ons that become realized in the site visitors' approach to the
environment
The ar8st establishes a graceful combina8on of image, word and flow. One visual
region presents a non‐changing presence illustra8ng the boyfriend's presence. The
rest of the visual realm is divided into mul8ple sta8c frames within which the
par8cipant interacts to illuminate conversa8on elements. This work has a
performa8ve character, and I found myself "playing" the frames in a combina8on
and speed that matched my own percep8on and interest. A built‐in disappearance
of naviga8on op8ons presents a graceful cadence for the piece, something that is
par8cularly unusual in the more commonplace never‐ending web experience
.This piece works well, and integrates the medium in a way that doesn't get in the way
of the content and message.
h,p://www.teleportacia.org/war

38. Organize/Reorganize?

39. http://www.moma.org/
http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/

40. BREAK

41. Create?

42. h,p://www.likeneveralways.com/uninspiredminimalistgraphicsandharmonica/

43. 1971 – Floppy diskette invented by IBM
1972 – Atari invented “pong”
1974 – Naim June Paik invents the term “information
superhighway”
1976 – Wozniak and Jobs form Apple Computer
1982 – Time magazine declares the computer as “Man
of the Year”
1985 – MIT Media Lab formed
1990 – HTML invented by Tim Berners-Lee

44. New Tool

45. New Media art emerged from its historical
precedents. Originally a marginal field (in the
hands of a few nerds) public interest grew out of
a fascination with the potential of new
technologies. In America, there was the
“California Ideology” which was libertarianism
and technological utopianism fed by “Wired”
magazine.

46. Germany’s first computer graphics were jointly produced in 1960 by the ar8st Kurd
Alsleben and the physicist Cord Passow. They worked on an analog computer which was
linked to an automa8c draing unit and transformed parameters of a differen8al
equa8on into devia8ons and disturbances.

47. Lillian Ross (1974) Night Scene • Computer generated etching on metal plate

48. Charles Csuri (1969) Un-tled • b/w Plo,er Drawing, ink on paper

49. Peter Kreis (1970) Compart no. 11 • Colored Plo,er Drawing

50. Tony Longson (1970) Group Theory Grid • computer assisted pain-ng

51. Stephen Bell (1978) Un-tled • computer assisted pain8ng
Material: Data generated using Ranstak program and "helix" shapes,
plo,ed on newsprint with cyan, magenta, and yellow edding 1380 brush‐pens. 9" x 9".

52. h,p://macke.informa8k.uni‐bremen.de/compartdb/d/
DATABASE for Early Computer Art

53. 1998 – Netscape announces that it will make its source
code freely available to the public
1998 – The Web becomes worldwide as the last 21
nations come online.
2000- stock market crash and bursting of dot.com
bubble.
2003 – New Museum affiliates with Rhizome.org
2004 - Google goes public, IPO fetches 1.7 billion
dollars
2009 – Facebook reaches 175m users making it the 8th
largest “country” in the world

54. ARTISTS

56. Auto Dregs Recordings
E* Rock Asteroids (2008) h,p://vimeo.com/2595795
Dim Dim Split (2010) h,p://vimeo.com/2414569

57. A Submission Idea
h,p://www.tedxpoznan.com/

58. Andy Deck
Screening Circle adapts the cultural tradi8on of the quil8ng circle into an online
format. Visitors to the site can enter the drawing area to compose loops of graphics
and affect and edit each other's screens. The pieces can be made by one person or
by several people and the arrangement of the segments can be haphazard or precise.
In the screening area, the resul8ng mo8on graphics will be on view instantaneously.
The Screening Circle (2003) h,p://www.artcontext.net/act/05/screeningCircle/

59. Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg
The Dumpster is an interac8ve online visualiza8on that a,empts to depict a slice
through the roman8c lives of American teenagers. Using real pos8ngs extracted from
millions of online blogs, visitors can surf through tens of thousands of roman8c
rela8onships in which one person has "dumped" another.
The Dumpster (2003) h,p://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/dumpster.shtml

60. Marc Lafia & Fang‐Yu Lin
The Ba,le of Algiers recomposes scenes from the 1965 film of the same name by
Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. The original film is a reenactment of the Algerian
na8onalist struggle leading to independence from France in 1962. The success of the
actual ba,le for independence has been a,ributed to the na8onalists' organiza8on: a
pyramidal structure of self‐organized cells. Lafia and Lin recomposed the film along a
cell‐based structure, in which French Authority and the Algerian Na8onalist cells are
represented by s8lls from the film and move according to different rule sets. When
cells of different camps intersect, they trigger video cells displaying each side's tac8cs
(as depicted in the film) according to the rules of the system.
The Ba,le of Algiers (2006) h,p://artport.whitney.org/commissions/ba,leofalgiers/Ba,leofAlgiers.shtml#

61. Mark Napier
Mark Napier's Shredder 1.0 interface was first revealed in 1998. The
Shredder 1.0 web interface was created to be both an interac8ve
exhibit as well as an artwork generator. To create an image the user
inserts a url into the Shredder 1.0 and the code is then
reinturpreted by a Perl Script code created by Napier.[1] Perl Script
is a stable, open source programming language and is the most
popular web programming language due to its text manipula8on
capabili8es and rapid development cycle.[2]In his piece summary
Napier explains that in his view the web is not a physically
representa8on of informa8on in the same way a magizine or book
is, but instead a temporary graphic created when browsing
soware interprets HTML instruc8on.[3] The focus of Shredder 1.0
is to reveal this hidden truth behind the internet and give the user a
new interpreta8on of common web pages.
www.potatoland.org/shredder/

62. Cory Arcangel
Super Mario Clouds
Super Mario Clouds» is based on the «Super Mario» game for Nintendo’s NES game
console. Cory Arcangel hacked the game and modified it so that all that remains of the
game are the white clouds on a blue sky. Gone is the main character, Super Mario, who
the player had to guide through a labyrinth in the original jump and run game, just like
the obstacles, landscapes and opponents that lend the game its narra8ve structure.
Those people who are familiar with the game can imagine them on the empty
background, everyone else will just see the cartoon‐like display of a sky. The work was
created on the basis of a manipula8on of the hardware and soware. Cory Arcangel
had to open the cartridge, on which the game was stored, and replace the Nintendo
graphics chip with a chip on which he had burned a program he had wri,en himself.
Cory Arcangel is a member of the Beige Programming Ensemble who have focused
their ar8s8c programme on the hacking ethic of manipula8ng exis8ng technology,
thereby taking the modifica8on of legacy technology to absurd extremes: the group
have published computer programs pressed on records and organise an annual
compe88on for «casse,e disk jockeys.»
h,p://www.coryarcangel.com/things‐i‐made/SuperMarioClouds

63. Harwood@Mongrel
"Uncomfortable Proximity" is the 8tle of this on‐line project
created by Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collec8ve.
Commissioned by Tate Na8onal Programmes, it mirrors the
Tate's own web‐site, but offers new images and ideas, collaged
from his own experiences, his readings of Tate works and
publicity materials and his interest in the Tate Britain site.
Related cri8cal texts by Ma,hew Fuller are in the Connec8ons
sec8on of the Tate web‐site".
Hogarth, My Dad 1700‐2000
At the TATE Website

64. MIT Media Lab

65. DATABASE AESTHETICS

66. John Klima
•
EARTH, a unique geo‐spa8al visualiza8on system,
culls real‐8me data from the Internet and
accurately posi8ons it onto a three‐dimensional
model of the Earth. The EARTH soware
accurately posi8ons real‐8me data culled from
the Internet on a three‐dimensional model of the
Earth. Viewers are able to travel from layer to
layer by zooming in and retrieving imagery and
data for specific regions.

67. Lisa Jevbratt
1:1 was a project created in 1999 which consisted of a
database that would eventually contain the addresses
of every Web site in the world and interfaces through
which to view and use the database. Crawlers were
sent out on the Web to determine whether there was a
Web site at a specific numerical address. If a site
existed, whether it was accessible to the public or not,
the address was stored in the database. However, the
Web was changing faster than the database was
updated and in 2001 it was clear that the database was
outdated.

68. Flickrgraph
Flickr Graph is an applica8on that explores the social
rela8onships inside
flickr.com. It makes use of the classic a,rac8on‐
repulsion algorithm for graphs. Start exploring your
contacts by entering your flickr username or the
email address you used to register there.

69. Christiane Paul
Mapping Transi8ons was an exhibi8on curated by Chris8an Paul at the University of
Colorado. While dis8nctly different in their approach, the art projects
commissioned for Mapping Transi8ons are all concerned with the visualiza8on of
various forms of data flow and data sets. Both Mary Flanagan’s and Lisa Jevbra,’s
project explore the ‘search’ as an aesthe8c form of mapping the Internet.
Flanagan’s [search] examines the search engine as a creator of context and
meaning by reconfiguring its content in a way that illustrates seman8c levels,
which usually aren’t obvious to the viewer. Displaying the constant stream of
ques8ons that users ask the Internet—a stream that ranges from the ridiculous to
the sublime—the project creates a topography of Internet users’ interests and a
map of the func8on that the Internet fulfills in people’s daily lives.

70. John Klima
Ecosystm is a real‐8me representa8on of global currency vola8lity fluctua8ons, leading
global market indexes, and up‐to‐the‐minute weather reports from JFK airport.
Commissioned in 2000 by Zurich Capital Markets, an investment company based in
New York, ecosystm takes data ZCM uses every day, re‐purposing it to drive a 3d
environmental simula8on viewers explore using a joys8ck. Ecosystm consists of
flocks of "birds" (each flock represen8ng a country's currency) and branching
"tree" structures (each tree represen8ng a country's leading market index). As a
market index advances, the tree grows new branches. If the index declines,
branches begin to fall off the tree. Similarly, a currency's current value against the
dollar is indicated by an increase or decrease in the popula8on of the flock.

71. Mouchette.org
h,p://mouche,e.org
Mouche'e.org is an interac1ve website created in 1996 by a
pseudonymous character, an Amsterdam‐based ar1st who calls herself
"Mouche'e". With her innocent saluta1on and claims to be "nearly
thirteen"[1] gree1ng us from the introduc1on page, what ini1ally appears as
a personal website of a pre‐pubescent female ar1st, evolves into darker
themes in the subsequent pages.

72. h,p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSP8xm_gaK4&feature=video_response

73. DATABASE AESTHETICS READINGS h,p://victoriavesna.com/dataesthe8cs/
Chris8ane Paul ‐ The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies
of Cultural Narra-ves
Lev Manovich ‐ Database as a Symbolic Form
Lev Manovich ‐ Data Visualiza-on as New Abstrac-on and An-‐Sublime
Warren Sack ‐ Aesthe-cs of Informa-on Visualiza-on
BreN Stalbaum ‐ An Interpre-ve Framework for Contemporary Database
Prac-ce in the Arts
BreN Stalbaum ‐ APer Land Art: Database and the Loca-ve Turn
Lev Manovich ‐ Social Data Browsing

74. RESOURCES:
h,p://www.computerarts.co.uk/home
h,p://www.wired.com/
h,p://www.eai.org/eai/aboutEaiFaq.htm
h,p://eyebeam.org/
h,p://ctheorymul8media.cornell.edu/f
h,p://www.likeneveralways.com/
h,p://rhizome.org/