LIJA MARKUS 2
The Old is Dying and The New Cannot Be Born
Do you know how it feels to have an idea, you so proud of, that you thought nobody else have ever explored and it is completely original? That is how I feel before I took New Media Art module in my school. I had a dream of creating a fake persona in social media, to an extent that ‘she’ have personal relationships, and connections to other ‘real’ social media user, as a critic towards the image- image relationship this postmodern world had become.
But It turns out that Lonelygirl15, a youtube persona, fooling people for years for being a legitimate individual, and Mouchette -refer to the blog before- had even before I was born. That story concludes that before this, I had no preceding knowledge about New-Media art, I have known of video art or video installation, but I have never thought of video art or other New- Media art in the aspect of its unique characteristic, which is the ‘media’.
Being said, to coin the term of new media art is not so much about the ‘new’ aspect even when it often utilise latest technology available, -because the definition of new and what is new will always change as the time progress- as much as it is about ‘media’. For what I have learned and new media artists that I have read/ visited the sites of, one red thread that connects those artwork is that audience affects the artwork as much as the artwork affects the audience. The current technology, (eg. Internet) have an ability that it could connect to many individuals at the same time, without even having to have a physical space to connect. New Media Artwork, works in the same sense with the Internet, without having physical body, it could exist and even further enjoyed virtually. The feedback loop is created by having the audience contribute to the artwork itself, for example, in BorderXing, Heath Bunting actually have real individuals in a certain location/ portals that could act as a guide for other people to follow his step crossing the border, or other people could attempt to cross the border and suggest better ways to cross the border. This act of evolving the artwork by the audience to be received by the future audience is the echoing characteristic of New Media Art.
Often times New Media Artwork theme revolves around privacy, such as BIT, anti-authoritarianism, like BorderXing, often anonymous or having a pseudo identity like Brandon or Mouchette.
Other artwork challenges the border of artwork, like Lena Park, where her own brainwaves are externalised as a mode of performance art, or Nam Jun Paik’s work which predict what would the art world would be. The possibility of themes that could be expressed using New Media technique is endless. As for now New Media we have known is not that much of a new thing anymore, and here we await for the new modes of art making to emerge from the path paved by the current ‘New Media Art’.