New Media Initiatives
Walker Art Center
November 1998
http://www.walkerart.org/archive/3/9C23A9E05C83429F6164.htm
New
The content of a new medium is always an old medium. Marshall McLuhan
We take this as a hydra-headed warning. What seems new may simply be putting a camera in the fifth row from the theater's proscenium. Filming a play was not yet cinema.
By the same token, while we may have replaced the idea of a linnear, progressing history with notions of cycles, discontinuities, revolution, complexity, and even parallel conspiracies, new is not without history. While acknowledging the fluidity of much contemporary digital activity, we seek to find compelling contexts for it.
Media
Computers both produce the material we experience and allow us to access it. The computer is a language machine. ... Turing simply defined the computer as a machine that could be any machine. It could be this because it was programmable--as such, operating symbolically upon symbolic things. This universe of symbolic forms includes the computer itself, and the recursive aspect of the medium is what leads to its real technological and therefore social power. To paraphrase Turing, the computer is the medium that can be any medium. Simon Biggs
Understanding what constitutes the medium may be even more difficult than defininig what is new about it. As a meta medium, we tend to view new media through the prism of our own experience and knowledge, whether it is video or photography, publishing or visual arts. As a meta medium, digital media can be like electricity, both object and subject, both what makes things run and something to run with. As a meta medium, computability may contribute to the breakdown of distinct disciplines while suggesting something distinctive.
Initiatives
The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored. Freeman Dyson
The answers to these and other questions cannot be answered only hypothetically. Artists, designers, information architects, interfacers, artificers, screeners, minglers curators, and producers will use the new tools to create new things that must be explored and, eventually, understood.
Steve Dietz
Director of New Media Initiatives
November 1998
