To browse Academia. This discussion explores the evolving relationship between New Media Art and contemporary art, emphasizing the integration of these fields as traditional art institutions increasingly recognize New Media practices. Historical perceptions of incompatibility, as highlighted by theorists like Lev Manovich, are reassessed through the lens of emerging philosophies such as Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, which reveal a nuanced understanding of materiality in art.
The paper advocates for a reevaluation of the notion of immateriality in New Media Art, promoting a materialistic perspective that extends beyond aesthetic concerns. This article investigates the relationship between art and technology, pointing the constants of a process of cultural digestion which is mediated by the very sovereign technological environmentthe Internet. Relying on the multiplicity and hybridization of the content formats, and also on the user involved interactivity as constructive vectorrelationships, new media art and the internet art are natural consequences of the artistic practices of creative appropriation of contemporary technological media.
As the complexity of the relationship between art and the technological environment becomes richer than ever, we assist to the creation of a contemporary ultra-technological culture, structurally dependent on the media and responsible for relativizing the critical positioning of the art consumer. Defining the premises of the interaction with a technologically interfaced world of art, the user reader of the Internet as a medium of expression isequallya consumer, and a producer of information content.
I will present these properties in the following discourse. The diversity within this field sometimes leads to attempts at defining new media art by juxtaposing its numerous types. However, such a definition renders the term meaningless, yielding in essence merely a collective term encompassing a variety of individually defined types. Moreover, it fails to provide criteria that would indicate the reasons for considering these particular types to be forms of new media art.
This term should, therefore, not be defined in reference to individual media or a juxtapositioning of a number of them, but by indicating what unites them and makes them types of new media art. The field of new media art remains unstable, constantly in a process of transformation. This is so not merely because of the emergence of new and different types of media, but also because of the transformations constantly taking place in the multidirectional relations between them, including those resulting from processes such as technological convergence, divergence, and remediation, which shape different media configurations and produce hybrid forms.
