Adrian Wahrer
Prof. Thomas Asmuth
ART2602C – Intro to Digital Studio Practice
12 January 2015
Prompt: How is New Media inclusice and exclusice of the traditional media?
Due to the nature of the craft – movement, rather – New Media exhibits a great irony on the highest level of which it lends its existence and subsequent perpetuity: the very fabric of its essence is driven almost purely by a means known to be tantamount to ephemerality and eventuality. The nature of the art form is decidedly mixed-media, with a multitude of potential applications with regards to developmental craftsmanship. And yet, because technology is both finite and its progression from inception to succession is bottlenecked by the human hearts and minds that birth it, the amount of sapient innovations cultivated in a landscape fueled by avarice and marketability that will not fall prey to the passage of time’s aggressive advances are infinitesimal. Simply put, through the eyes of an onlooker unmarred by the relative notion of presence – present state of being – the descriptor “New Media” is largely nominal in the grand scheme of things. The progressively ultimate, rapid-to-vapid nature of technology sees any given advancement go from desirable, to outmoded, and finally disposable. The format has self-disparaging connotations on paper. In what world would a medium like this – whose definite components are prone to wear or even outright moribund in a matter of years to months to even days, depending on its machinations – survive? Its sustenance is paradoxical, its groundings further precarious. The true keys to its current state of infallibility hinge on two major proponents, perchance: the capacity for empathy through interactivity, corporeal or subconsciously, by the consumer; and its inclusion of traditional media content.
While there is room for application of more seasoned forms of arts prior to work their way into New Media, that’s not to say the art form is without its hurdles. The complicated, highly specialized baselines by which New Media makes its evolutionary strides are equal parts arcane and insular, largely in part due to the hacktivists and hipsters that go to great lengths to solidify it as a unique field with contradictory, roundabout “neo-retro-modernist” undertones depending on who you ask. It must be modern, but meaningful; despite up-and-coming media arts largely being unsullied by the throes of finding one’s place in media perception, it has to make points of contrarian substance and heightened circumstance. It must be evocative, yet interactive; the truly realized New Media works have to appeal to a broad scale of viewers, but in such a way that every interpretation is personalized. It must be compounding, yet comprehensive; a sense of relative minimalism, in the way a bicycle pump may seem concise compared to a circulatory system, hangs over most New Media work because a distilled idea can provide a vector from image to interpretation much more easily than the work of a specialist, and yet New Media is a highly specialized form of art. Again, this all ties back to New Media’s gateways to relatability. How do you pitch a vacillating, double-thinking Möbius strip of an ideology to the generalist masses? You ground it, humanize it.
Traditional media’s necessity within the New Media practice is one of virulent commensalism, as painstakingly clarified and further clouded above. New Media artists are a highly specialized sort, and while they make clear commentaries, their virtues are vacancies compared to the relative ideological seamstresses of pure vision and burning implication that are artists of the traditional sort. New Media artists are strange in that they do not paint pictures: they establish frameworks, build proverbial canvases. Their audience paints the picture, by means of personalized interpretation. However, relatability and empathy are largely dependent on some minimum modicum of relevant points of interest or reference, which is where traditional media comes in. Traditional media can more deeply contextualize New Media art, and further fuel the gestalt identity New Media naturally possesses. To clarify: what is repercussion without action? Reverberation without sound? Reflection without image? Traditional media benefits New Media not by bolstering its existence, but by allowing it. Retrospectively, New Media works largely as a complicated aperture to view the finer microcosmic mechanics of existing traditional works, or even elements of humanity as a legacy. It allows inclusions for reasoning and grounding, for relatability, and for perspective. The complexity of the relationship results in New Media scaring away certain thematic works that would be seen as ideal or beneficial in favor of more alien concepts that would suit a taste as poignant and sharp as a practice like New Media, like cream to an embittered coffee.
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