Re: [-empyre-] Opening remarks on new media history

[Chris Chesher <c.chesher@unsw.edu.au>]

This has been a really hot discussion, and here's my take for today...

On Saturday, January 3, 2004, at 10:42  AM, Sue Thomas wrote:

> I'm interested in the notion of new media as a 'discipline' (see Anna's
> comment below). Is it possible that new media (or whatever we want to 
> call
> it) is the first artform to be defined as a discipline (with all its
> critical and academic overtones) rather than as, simply, a form of art.

Part of the useful vagueness in the term 'new media' that Anna points 
out is that is has many possible meanings. Some of these are:

1) Historical category (old media, new media)

2) Artistic medium (oil painting, sculpture, architecture, new media...)

3) Media technology (print, television, cinema, new media...)

4) Field of study (history, sociology, geography, new media studies...)



Computer-based media are often new media, but (as someone said earlier) 
not all applications of computers are new media; nor do all new media 
practices use computers.

Another way to define new media studies is to say it is research (which 
includes both production and analysis of others' work) into expressive 
events that change not only the content, but also the mode of 
communication.

When a communicational event is relatively conventional, we can't talk 
about it in as new media. Where it deviates from conventional 
standards, it becomes a new media event: it creates a new medium, and 
it is this dimension of innovation that becomes the object of focus for 
new media studies.

This definition has implications for all the above meanings:

1) Contemporary experience is characterised by a proliferation of new 
media forms, motivated largely by desires for economic expansion, and 
ubiquity of computer technologies. So the term 'new media' is currently 
meaningful as a historical distinction, although this is not necessary 
for the term to be useful.

2) New media artists tend to experiment with the modes by which 
communication takes place (by playing with relationships to audiences, 
modes of interaction), as much as operating with content and 
expression. This is where the history of performance art might be 
considered part of a new media tradition (for better or worse).

3) Since computer-based media are software controlled, they are 
vehicles optimised to produce new media events. A new program creates a 
new mode of communicating. So while not all new media are 
computer-based, computers are optimised to perform as new media. 
However, programming is only part of software control, since it's the 
gaps for user input (that allow the software to do things beyond those 
anticipated by the programmer) that are crucial to new media 
configurations.

4) New media as a field of study tends to look at media change, at each 
of the above levels, to different degrees (we could retrospectively 
identify Innis, McLuhan, Ong & others who have looked at media change 
as new media theorists).






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