GoodWork Paper 9: New Media Art: A New Frontier or Continued Tradition?

Author(s): Kaley Middlebrooks

Editor(s): Jeff Solomon, Series Editor

Media: Paper

Description: Today the processes by which art is made can involve very little of the hand‘s work due to the availability of new technologies for making artists‘ visions a reality. Powerful programming can render both fantastic and life-like images of objects and landscapes; artists can now use keystrokes instead of brushstrokes to create them. This research asks: Is technology fundamentally changing art as we know it? Does new media art represent a qualitative change in the way art, at least in the West, has been conceived, created, and shared? These questions were posed to artists and curators who work with new media. The report discusses areas of debate and agreement about recent technology‘s influence on art. The artists and curators interviewed acknowledged that art has both changed and showed continuity over the last forty years of technological developments. All agreed that technology has altered neither the fundamental notion of what art is nor the role of the artist in the creative enterprise. Yet they clearly believed that computer and Internet technology have changed the tools, the skills, and the processes by which art is made.