New_Media_Artists

The enormous success and popularity of the Internet and new media as a whole have changed society in many ways. Artists have begun to use new media to deliver their works. As the artists use new media such as the Internet, the medium in which the work is delivered has become part of the artwork itself. In old media the book in which a story was printed is not part the literary piece of art. Ed Falco’s “Self-Portrait as Child with Father” and Olia Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” are examples of McLuhan's message that the medium is the message. Both artworks are examples of new media art as defined by Lev Manovich in “The Language of New Media”. The introduction of new media art forms have changed the role of the artist, as the medium of digital art has now become the message itself making the individual ideas, perspectives, and narratives of the artist less important to the artwork as a whole. Marshall McLuhan is one of the first to articulate some of the social consequences of the great technological advances of the 20th Century. In his book “The Medium is the Message” from 1964 he introduces the idea that with the use of the new media as forms of communication it is the medium itself that is the message and he explains that, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (Liu 1). The message will therefore change according to the medium. As we will see with new media art, the message would clearly be different if Ed Falco’s “Self-Portrait as Child with Father” was read linearly in a traditionally printed book than when experienced in its actual online non-linear presentation. Olia Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” is presented similarly as an online non-linear artwork. These artworks are interactive in the sense that the reader must click on links to read the story, or using a traditional turn the reader must click the link to virtually turn the page. Since there are multiple links at the same time the different pages are read at different times and in different order from reader to reader. It is therefore the case that no two readers of the artworks will have the same experience and opinion about them. McLuhan emphasises the significant change in presentation of text from being linear and in a specific order to the new non-linear and random presentation of texts as we see in new media. His own writing exemplifies this, as his writing is not structured in a traditional way with clear distinct parts leading to a conclusion. His writing is random as if he wrote it in the order he thoughts of it. Though introducing this new way to look at media, McLuhan does not offer a definition of new media and how it differs from old media. Lev Manovich is the first person to develop clear definitions of new media to better understand the significance and consequences of new media. He introduces the five principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Numerical representation means that the piece of information has been digitalized. Traditional pictures developed from negatives for example are continuous pieces of information, whereas pictures printed out with a printer have a numerical representation, as it can be broken down to millions of small dots of distinct colors. Each dot has only one color while the developed pictures are continuous in colors and cannot be broken down into separate distinct pieces. Modularity is the ability to assemble various pieces of data and put them together into a larger-scale object without the individual piece of data losing its value (Liu 65). Automation uses the fact that the data is in digital form and it can be put together or taken apart to allow the user to create media objects faster and with greater flexibility. The use of automated responses introduced computer games and the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). However, this is only made possible by limiting the space in which the user can operate. A computer game might give the user a number of option for which the computer have responses, but the user can therefore only choose within the boundaries of the program. Automation allows the user to search data for certain characteristics such as a word in a text or an object in a picture. Reusing existing data in new ways before easier and faster than creating new objects from scratch. Variability allows for a media object to be created or presented in different versions. Old media would combine different part to create a certain object. Once created only exact copies of it could be made. But with the use of automation and variability in new media, customisation of a media objects is fast and easy. For example, certain Web sites select different versions for different users to optimise the user’s experience by evaluating the user’s connection speed, hardware capabilities, etc. Transcoding is the most substantial consequence of the computerized media according to Lev Manovich. Since all new media is connected to the use of a computer and presented to us through a computer, we can expect the logic of the computer to influence our logic of media. Lev Manovich argues that the close interaction between the human culture and the logic of the computer including its ways of representation will affect each other and in some way blend together creating a new computer culture (Liu 63-74). Ed Falco’s “Self-Portrait as Child with Father” and Olia Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” fulfil Lev Manovich’s five principles of new media. Both artworks are digitalized and therefore numerical and modular as they are delivered through a computer. When reading the works a level of automation is integrated as a new development in the artwork occurs according the link selected. Olia Lialina’s artwork proves to be extremely variable as a separate website has been created where people post different versions of her story that they have created themselves. The texts are the same but the ways they are presented are altered to the individual person’s likings (Lialina). Ed Falco’s artwork is also variable in the mere sense that the experience varies every time as the links lead the reader to a different page in random order, which ultimately changes the reader’s perception of the story and the work as a whole from reading to reading. The idea of transcoding is central to the message of both artworks as the artworks attempt to mediate a literary piece of art in a way most unusual to the reader. “Self-Portrait as Child with Father” and “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” are created with the new computer culture discussed by Lev Manovich in mind. The stories are broken down into separate pieces and viewed at random and no longer in a continuous and unchangeable version independent of the reader. The stories are manipulated in all these ways to integrate them with the new computer culture. The text itself is in that sense not central to the artwork as a whole, as the message of the artwork is to represent this new computer culture and the introduction of new media into society. Ed Falco and Olia Lialina could have accomplished this with any text possible. And as we learned from Lev Manivich’s five principles of new media, the features and alterations made to the texts and the presentation of them to the reader are done by the medium itself and not by the artists. You could argue that the true artists of these works are therefore the designers of the new media as they made it possible by fragmenting texts into pieces and presenting them at random and alter pictures by blurring them, resizing them, and changing resolution as we see in the two artworks discussed. However, as Lev Manovich points out that the media society is “now concerned as much with accessing and reusing existing media objects as with creating new ones” (Liu 68) we might think of the works from a different point of view. Old media such as writing merely laid the foundation for literary artists to create works of their own whether it is short stories, novels, or poets. I assume nobody would argue that the inventor of writing is essentially the true artist of “Macbeth” or “Romeo and Juliet”. However, it might not be correct to draw a direct connecting between writing and computing as media of art. Lev Manovich’s five principles of new media are central to new media art, whereas the absence of Lev Manovich’s five principles of new media is central to old media art. As a result of this, artists using old media and artists using new media are opposites by definitions and might not be comparable. The introduction of new media has created a new place for artists to express themselves in a way distinct from artists using old media. If considering creating art from old media to be complete distinct from creating art from new media, you might find the roles of the artists in relation to their work similar. However, if considering art to be art without respect to the medium in which it is transmitted, the artist of a magnificent piece of writing such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth is absolutely essential to the work while the artist combining and assembling different pieces of existing works in a new way using new media is not as unique as the traditional writer. Since the medium is essential to the message and many people can use the medium to the same extend as Olia Lialina and Ed Falco, the message of their works could have been created by many other, while the message of Shakespeare’s Macbeth can only be created by Shakespeare himself. Since the medium is message in new media art, the message of the new media artists is limited within the technological boundaries of the new media, while the old media artist is only limited by his or her ability to think, imagine, and fantasise.