olia lialina

Olia Lialina is the artist responsible for "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War," a website created with basic gif images and html code that tells the story lovers reunited after a war. It is "among the first works of New Media art to produce the kind of compelling and emotionally powerful experience that we have come to expect from older, more established media." Lialina calls MBCBFTW a "netfilm." I think this is an important piece because of the way, thematically, it split with ideas of what new media art is and can be by adding evocative emotional elements to relatively simple code and text. 

alexei shulgin

Alexei Shulgin is the front man of 386 DX, the "world's first cyberpunk rock band" featuring an old computer and MIDI software. The use of antiquated technology is intentional as Shulgin is satirizing contemporary technological culture in part. 

keith obadike

Keith Obadike is a "sought after sound designer" on the hip hop scene. Obadike attempted to auction off his blackness on eBay as a performance art piece. The idea that heritage or ethnicity is something that can be bought and sold is new but this piece recalls Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, artists who both created self portraits "exaggerating [their] negroid features." Pieces like these show how discussions about race as it relates to identity aren't over just because the sixties are over. 

julia scher

Julia Scher's work "explores issues related to electronic security." Scher creates installation pieces based on the idea of surveillance and then digitally alters the data that she collects, thus illustrating the way in which surveillance can be both faulty and altered.

Of her own work, Scher says that she first saw surveillance "in terms of looking at landscape." I find this to be interesting because landscape is often a subject in traditional painting or drawing, however, in appropriating this subject into digital media with an entirely new purpose, Scher really is making a statement about contemporary art.

john klima

John Klima, a photography major from SUNY Purchase, created "Glasbead." "Glasbead" is an interface that "exemplifies the convergent nature of new media art." It is an interactive online artwork and can be found here. Klima was inspired to create this piece by Herman Hesse and his novel entitled "The Glass Bead Game." Klima's work is considered to be interdisciplinary in that he employs techniques learned from being a software designer as well as attending art school, but also that he incorporates literature into the meaning of his work. Having all of those influences allows for his work to be multi-dimensional in a way that can often be true of new media artists.

mark napier

Mark Napier is the creater of "Shredder 1.0." This is an interactive work of art that allows the viewer to enter a web address into the system and watch as it jumbles the site. Shredder "literally deconstructs the site, slicing and dicing its text, imagery, and source code to form abstract compositions."

I got super carried away and shredded every site that I go to (my blog, friends' blogs, school website, email, etc.). It was really fun but after a while it kind of freaked me out. It's like when you're a kid and you see someone dressed in a suit of one of your favorite characters. You might know on some level that it's not real, but once you see the zipper, you're crushed. This is like seeing the zipper on all of my favorite websites.

raqs media collective

Raqs Media Collective Operates on an online platform that allows artists to upload their work. Then, work is mixed together to create what they call a "recsension," or a sort of remix of many artists work into one, new work. Raqs Media Collective operates on the principle of appropriation, that is, the borrowing of already existing art to create new, different art.

"From Dada to Pop, and from found footage film to hip hop, appropriation has become an increasingly important strategy for artists of all stripes."

®TMark

RTMark is a website that "serves as a portrait of the internet" or "socially conscious sabotage." The makers are a group of new media artists who choose to remain anonymous. They choose sites to parody, such as George W. Bush's presidential site, or a the Backstreet Boys homepage, and make their version very close the real thing, so that it would be possible for a viewer to not know what they're looking at.

I was drawn to this work because of the comparison to Marcel Duchamp's readymades. I think that RTMark has similar motives as Dada artists did but with a slightly more obvious message. When we are forced to consider things art that we normally would not, it effects not only our perspective on art and culture, but also on the society in which we live, and ourselves.

jodi

Jodi is a web interface that "can be seen as a formalist investigation of the intrinsic characteristics of Internet as a medium." When a viewer sees the webpage, it is just a jumble of fragmented code and what looks like a glitch. However, if they know HTML, they can enter it in to see a plan for an atom bomb, conceptually close to exploding the internet. Jodi.org gives viewers the opportunity to experience a "disconcerting" view of the internet.

This reminds me of other art that lets you see into its process. For instance, painters who leave some parts of the canvas unpainted and unprimed, or media artists working with electronics that allow you to see the plugs and cables. When this happens, the process becomes the art. Art has traditionally been known as something that should be experienced from the surface, but new media artists force you to enter into the experience of the making of that art in addition to the finished product.

nam june paik

Nam June Paik is considered to be the first video artist in America. He participated in the Neo-Dada art movement that, like its predecessor, strove to challenge certain views of what constituted art, to tear down "art with a capital A."

I was drawn to Paik after seeing a particularly powerful piece at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The piece is called "Electronic Superhighway." It features all of the states in America outlined in neon lights with television monitors broadcasting different things in each state. The audio is largely Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson speeches from the sixties, a formative decade in the history of racial conflict in the US. The piece is touching; it pulls at some emotions in a precise way. I've been to see it multiple times and often observed viewers moved to tears.

Paik's use of video as a media challenges the viewer to accept new media as art. In doing so, works like "Electronic Superhighway" strike a different chord that do contemporary paintings about similar subjects.

shu lea cheang

Shu Lea Cheang is an experimental new media artist. She works with combinations of video, photography, and what she calls "net-based installation" art. Cheang's work often confronts different sociopolitical issues, primarily including ones of gender and sexuality. Her most prominent works belong to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Guggenheim collections.

This particular piece is called "Brandon." Cheang was commissioned by the Guggenheim to create this piece of new media art based on the life of Teena Brandon, a transsexual who, in 1993, was raped and murdered because of her sexuality. "Brandon" can be found here. The viewer first sees the image of a baby becoming a woman becoming a man, which is a literal allusion to Brandon's life. When the viewer, clicks on the morphing image, the curser can be moved around the screen to illustrate different images relating to transsexuality, and more specifically, Teen Brandon.

As the curser is dragged around the screen, the images continue to change. It is unsettling and the viewer feels confronted or targeted. Phrases from newspaper headlines like "she's a he," "killed for," "romance," "all," "exposure," and "rage" make the narrative undeniably human and from there common. That the viewer can relate to the art is what is most disturbing and sad about the way in which Cheang has portrayed Teena Brandon's tragedy.