ON THURSDAY, February 23rd in Carson L02 at 4:30pm, Lisa Nakamura, interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, new media and cinema, and critical / cultural studies, will be gracing us with her presence with a talk titled “Trash Talk: Instrumental Racism as a Procedural Strategy in Online Games.”

Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media and Cinema Studies Department and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace and Race After the Internet.  She is currently working on a new monograph tentatively entitled Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds.

And then… ON FRIDAY, February 24th in Haldeman 041 at 2:30pm, Lisa Nakamura will moderate a panel titled “ROBOT SKIN: The Consumption of Race in Technoscience” with panelists Thuy Linh Tu, Minh-ha Pham, and Dartmouth’s own Aimee Bahng.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where she is also the director of the American Studies Program. She is the author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Asian Chic and co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. She is currently conducting research on the uses of science in the multinational cosmetics industry.

Minh-Ha T. Pham is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art & Visual Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University. Broadly, her research traces the historical relations of art, society, and technology through fashion.

Aimee Bahng is an Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her book manuscript, “Speculative Acts: Science and Fiction in an Age of Finance Capitalism” examines cultural narratives of futurity, including but not limited to financial discourses of security and risk as well as speculative fiction by North American women of color. Her research delves within the domains of Transnational Asian American Studies, Speculative/Science Fiction, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Cinema Studies and Film Theory, Comparative Studies of Race, and Critical Studies of Globalization, Labor, and Empire.

But video games, particularly more modern games with complex modification and engine manipulation tools freely available (see Garry’s Mod, the Elder Scrolls series, or the Unreal engine), provide a host of surprisingly useful functions for the creation of art. In fact, an entire community of video-game filmmakers exists, dedicated to creating movies in a virtual environment: machinima.

Machinima resides in a very particular niche: it isn’t quite animation, though the resultant film is indeed animated. Instead, the creator of machinima functions almost like the director of a live-action movie, dictating the actions of each actor, arranging lighting and camera angles, creating and setting scenes—only in an entirely virtual environment. Since the traditional need to render each frame is subverted, the costs and time demands are considerably lower than typical animation projects.

Machinima has typically been rooted strongly in gamer culture. Films like “How to Win at League of Legends,” for example, are clearly directed at their specific audience. They are sometimes considered to be holding back machinima as an art form, since those outside of this audience would find little to no value, artistic or entertainment, without the background knowledge. But some videos have become famous memes, achieving popularity well beyond this subset of society. Leeroy Jenkins became an internet phenomenon after a video of his shenanigans reached the web, but his influence has spread to Jeopardy and even military strategy.  Meanwhile, the 2005 political machinima film “The French Democracy” achieved substantial mainstream media attention. The film insinuates that racism was responsible for the 2005 riots in France.

A still from the machinima "The French Democracy"

Films like “The French Democracy” epitomize what Friedrich Kirschner considers necessary for machinima to become its own form. According to him, machinima must “free itself from its connection to the computer games industry.” He believes that such diversification of the medium could result in a “fully-fledged new medium” in the vein of Adobe Flash.

With the rapid advancement of new media art technologies, it’s important we keep an open mind with respect to what is and isn’t art. To the layman, movies of people playing video games bear no artistic value. But this medium holds tremendous potential, allowing anyone with a $60 copy of a video game and basic video editing software to create incredibly powerful movies. “The French Democracy” took all of four days to make, and its results were reported all around the globe. Imagine what a concerted community’s efforts to could create.

References

Moltenbrey, Karen.  “Making Machinima.” Computer Graphics World 28.11 (2005): 26. Web.  7 Feb. 2012.

Kirschner, Friedrich. “Machinima’s Promise.” Journal of Visual Culture 10.19 (2011): 19-24. Web. 7 Feb. 2012.

Everybody makes jokes about the apocalypse, but it’s not so funny when it shows up in the middle of the night on your back doorstep.

They come in twos. Silently, they assemble in the park, the shopping district, the back alleys of downtown Manhattan, communing…planning… Marking their courses, they disperse in pre-planned regiments to blend themselves in among the people. By the time their surveillance period is finished, they have gathered more than enough information for a successful invasion, and no one will be able to stop them. And what would be the point? After all, they’re only balloons…

~~~

Jenny Marketou wakes up to a beautiful morning in the fall of 2005. Her art career is flourishing, the sun is out, and her husband is gone for the day. The world is full of unexpected and boundless opportunity. She decides to check up on one of her latest projects. Jenny walks into her surveillance installation in the Krannert Art Museum in Champagne, Illinois- to find an empty room.

“What’s going on here?” She calls to the scant number of people in the room. the visitors amble around, looking at the tape marks on the walls and floor, confused. A boy mumbles to his sister, “They call this art?” Workers at the museum run around, ushering folk off to other exhibits. Jenny brushes the hair back from her face, distressed: looking for answers. Then she sees the curator, Michael Rush, frantically pacing to and fro in the corner, dialing a number on his cell phone. Her own mobile rings. She answers it, immediately flooding the receiver with questions. “Did- did you not like my work? Have you decided not to show the piece? Did something happen  to the balloons?”

“That’s just it,” he replies with the same barely controlled tone of tense frustration, looking across the room and unexpectedly meeting her eyes. He hangs up and walks toward her. “We thought you’d decided to pull out. The cleaning staff came in on Sunday morning, and everything was gone…”

 ~~~

There is silence, for a moment. Pedestrians stop and stare at the wondrous objects floating lazily across the sky. A child taps her mother’s shoulder. “Look, mommy– balloons!” One of the balloons detaches from the crowd and descends to the height of the little girl. She reaches out, delighted, grabbing the dangling string– and then all hell breaks loose.

 The balloons descend automatically and initiate their projection sequence, a montage of war clips uploaded from the database of a separate art project called Threatbox US. The sounds draw even more people to the objects. Then, once great crowds have collected around the floating soldiers, they initiate the Spotlight. Balloons zoom across the sky, pinpointing the locations of specific humans and zapping them with electronic pulses that render them senseless.

Chaos is in the air. Governments world-wide are calling each other, blaming the other for unprovoked attacks on their citizens. Then, the bombing starts. Pre-emptive strikes set out across the continents, razing sky-scrapers and houses and other planes, crashing in flaming heaps of shrapnel to the ground. As the night moves on, anarchy increases. The majority of the populace feels certain that doom is imminent. Stores are looted, car races ensue. A mother crouches behind a fallen semi-truck with her little girl, praying that the destruction will cease.

And, just as suddenly, it does.

The little girl peers out from behind her mother’s arms, and in the lightening sky, detects no trace of balloon or plane. She tiptoes out of shelter, and sees the inert forms of man and building, broken and lying on the ground together. “Momma– momma, you can come out now, it’s all right, they’ve gone!” She shouts joyfully…but her mother does not stir. Behind her shoulder blade, a small piece of shrapnel is lodged: part of the surveillance camera of one of the balloons.

The  little girl wanders the streets alone, desperate to find another breathing form, tears running down her face. She stumbles and begins to run, crying out for someone, anyone. At last, she sinks to her feet beside a murky puddle. Her dress is disheveled and her feet are cold. “This is all so terrible…” she sighs. “Unless…it is just a dream?”

Her belly grumbles, and as night sets in once more, the girl begins to shiver. She lays down beside the puddle and mutters to herself, before sleep takes her, “It was only a dream. It was only a dream….”

The Last Human...

References:

http://www.jennymarketou.com/99RedBalloons.shtml

http://www.threatbox.us/concept/index.html

http://www.jennymarketou.com/FlyingSpyPotatoes2005.shtml

http://www.presidiacreative.com/45-impressive-concept-artworks-by-lisa-rye/

BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP!

What was that? Oh, it’s the alarm. I was up late last night and forgot to turn it off! Suddenly NPR News crackles through the tiny speakers of my Rolling Alarm Clock with news anchors, Bob and Robin informing me that Gingrich is on the attack. He’s accusing Romney of “carpet-bombing” his record, while Mitt’s going after Obama’s record. Then I get the shocking news straight from the IMF, “the whole global economy is hanging in a balance… if Europe’s problems get any worse, it could push the entire world back into a recession.” This is especially troubling to me, because I’m planning to graduate next spring. What will the job market look like? Will I have to crawl back to Vulcan Video for my old job? Maybe I should have majored in something more practical like computer science. My parents have made it clear to me that they’re tired of supporting me. They even gave me a deadline to move out of their basement. Oh well, I’m taking it one day at a time. Just as I’m preparing to brush my teeth, Bob comes back with some uplifting news. “Google is really not evil!” Huh? All that hype about them making money at the expense of our privacy is false. The fact is, Google needs our data, to create, “beautiful, simple, and intuitive user experiences.” And besides, I rely on Google Groups to stay connected with my MMORPGs. Shit! I knew they weren’t part of Bush’s, “Axis of Evil!”

Okay, enough of this touchy, feely stuff. It’s Saturday, and today I get to take my rad Avatar Machine out for a spin. The packaging describes it as a wearable system that replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming. Marc Owens created it. I recently got it on eBay from a guy who purchased it without his wife’s permission. Facing a divorce, he was forced to sell it. The Avatar Machine comes with a full set of limbs, engineered to fit your body. It has a headset with an embedded monitor. There’s a black harness that fits over my shoulders with a tripod and video camera mounted to it. A tag attached to it reads, “Warning: The system potentially allows for diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.” Now if that isn’t a selling point what is? I follow all the instructions, put on the parts, and take a peek in the mirror. I look like a WoW (World of Warcraft) character come to life. Simply put, I look badass! I’m ready to hit the streets.

I fire up the camera and like magic, I’m inside a virtual world. I’ve never had an out of body experience, but this must be what it feels like. I can see my body moving slightly ahead of me. A wide-angle lens makes it so that my eyes focal length is shorter but my cone of vision is wider. I lock the door with my huge claw like hands, then turn to walk down the stoop. I miscalculate the last step, causing me to stumble, and crash into a fence post. No worries, the suit is made of high-density foam for looks and protection. I brush it off and continue.

As I enter this strange new world, Gumba, my parent’s cat comes flying around the corner. Suddenly, she stops in mid-stride, gives me a blank stare, then takes off in the opposite direction. Clearly she’s perplexed. I raise my arms and just for grins, let out a deep growling sound. “YAARG!” I wonder what people are going to think? What will their reaction be? Victor and Joey Segura, a couple of neighborhood kids notice me first. They move towards me with curiosity and caution. I feel a heightened sense of strength. My body begins to take on a Warrior like persona. “Who are you?” yells Joey, the younger of the two. I stop, and silently stare at the brothers for a couple of seconds, then walk away. In my periphery, I see people in cars slowing down to look at me. Some honk their horns, while others don’t even acknowledge me. One guy sticks his head out the window and yells, “My son loves Optimus Prime!” As I loop back around the block I notice a gang of kids tracking me. When I stop, they stop. When I turn around, they hide. This hide-and-seek game repeats over and over, all the way back to my apartment.

Later, as I sit at my computer chatting, I recall how liberating it was to take my Avatar out for a stroll. Like MMORPGs I felt immersed in a world that was transforming around me. I wonder what it would be like to carry an object like a sword into this environment. Tomorrow, I’ll ride the B-Line into Copley Square and find out. Or maybe I’ll enter the Boston Public Library through the old section. It offers a wide-open marble staircases and dramatic views of the famous John Singer Sargent murals. The security guards are going to freak! I’ll probably get escorted out of the building. Or maybe they’ll humor me and play along. I would bet the majority of people given the opportunity, would love to act out their fantasies in public. I’m so excited I can hardly wait!

Works Cited

“Gingrich Attacks Romney Ahead Of Florida Vote : NPR.” NPR : National Public Radio : News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts : NPR. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http://www.npr.org/2012/01/29/146055492/gingrich-attacks-romney-ahead-of-florida-vote>.

Hartley, Matt. “Is Google Evil? Not Really.” Business.financialpost.com. Financial Post, 26 Jan. 2012. Web. <http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/26/is-google-evil-not-really/>.

“HowStuffWorks “How the Avatar Machine Works”" HowStuffWorks “Learn How Everything Works!” Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http://www.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/avatar-machine.htm>.

Kessler, Glenn, and Peter Baker. “Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ Comes Back to Haunt United States.” Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100901130.html>.

Video

http://youtu.be/wV2O4aC_3Gc

http://vimeo.com/7204895

Web

http://www.marcowens.co.uk/

http://designproductscollection.rca.ac.uk/home/

The first work that piqued my interest was The Paradise Institute. It was the perfect example of something that looked “bigger on the inside.” The work itself looked like a wooden box with two doors. The viewers enter the doors and sit in red movie theater seats. The illusion is created of a 1940s cinema. I was already captured by the idea of transporting people into the past, and creating the illusion of a cinema. But the illusion is extended as the viewers put on the headphones. Besides hearing the dialogue of the film they are watching, voices are simulated, as well as sounds, of the people around you. You occasionally hear voices of other nonexistent members of the audience, commenting about the film or asking if you would like more popcorn.

The idea can almost be seen as reminiscent of the movie Inception. As the phone rings in the audience, the film character’s attention is caught. The disjoint images of the film and the intertwined actions and reactions of the audience make for a surreal experience, where the film becomes one with the viewers. “The installation not only blurs the distinction between narrative sense and nonsense, it also breaks down the boundaries that exist between the actors in the film and the observers in the audience.”¹ This work is much like Miller’s solo work Conversation, Interrogation.

The viewer is taken into a 1984-type of living space, as he or she interacts with a television interface; the image on the screen talks to you, and then slowly begins to interrogate you. While we find the phenomenon quite common in movies, it becomes much more eerie in person. “As the title suggests, the tone of the virtual interview shifts from banal chatter to manipulative interrogation, and its intent is never clear. The nausea produced by pseudo-conversation with an inflexible humanoid machine—now a fact of our daily life –—is central to the nightmare quality of the experience.”²

But not all of Cardiff and Miller’s works take on the mysteriously dark approach to life’s illusions. Some actually invoke the magical world of Doctor Who, where far-off planets and people can be quite unusually wonderful in their obscurity. The works in particular I call to mind are The Cabinet of Curiousness and Ship O’ Fools.

When seeing The Cabinet of Curiousness, I was transported to the land of Gallifrey, Wonderland, and Mordor. The work unassumingly take on the appearance of an antiqued card catalog, which now has gone out of use with current computer databases.

The work invites the audience members to open the drawers, unlocking the secrets within which can’t be more surprising: sounds. Each drawer contains a sound, unlocked as the drawer is pulled open to reveal. The audience member becomes a disc jockey, mixing the pulled and “unpulled” drawers in creative ways. This work especially was a great treat for me because I’m an avid lover of music and old-fashioned things. And this simple combination of the two was a great new look at life I had never considered. Bringing to life the imagined, especially in real time like this work, was where I finally understood how true interactivity can be a medium in new media art.

Then there was the Ship O’ Fools. From the outside, it seems sculptural in its design, but actually the artists salvaged the Chinese ship; the real work is hidden inside. Inside, there seems to be an aimless Rube Goldberg invention.

The work makes use of the various contraptions to invoke the many references to this entity in literature and art. Like all the other works, the various devices create the atmosphere. To invoke the ideas of the underworld and how the Ship of Fools contains obscure and aimless passengers without a captain, they create a cacophony of sound and images, juxtaposed with the normal interior of a Chinese ship.

In all, Cardiff and Miller spoke to me through their pieces because they seemed to bring to life all the wonderful things I thought possible only in films and stories. Better than magic, they use engineering and robotics and technology to make the world of Doctor Who come to life, where technology and society and space are merged into one. I was reminded particularly of this philosophy when reading a comment by Cardiff, which reiterated one of the hallmarks of Doctor Who culture: “When [people] first enter in [Ship O’ Fools], they would be expecting to see what you would normally find in a ship — beds and a galley and a little toilet…But what we decided to do was create a maze that made them go to the right and to the left and then back again and thus create a space that was much bigger than it actually was.”³

1. http://www.nypress.com/article-5756-the-paradise-institute.html
2. http://vueweekly.com/front/story/taking_technology_over_to_the_dark_side_gallerys_exhibit_coerces_us_to_face/
3. http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/artdesign/story/2010/06/10/cardiff-miller-ship.html

]]> http://www.tiltfactor.org/the-perception-of-perspective-focus-on-janet-cardiff-and-george-bures-miller-by-shloka-kini/feed 0 http://www.tiltfactor.org/beauty-is-in-the-eyes-of-the-gamer-by-goyo http://www.tiltfactor.org/beauty-is-in-the-eyes-of-the-gamer-by-goyo#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:53:33 +0000 newmedia http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=5046

In 2005 film critic Roger Ebert set off a cyber lucha libre when he declared, “Video games can never be art.” In his own words, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of the great poets, filmmakers, and novelists.” Ebert delivered his statement through his Chicago Sun Times blog. Almost immediately, it was countered with a mix of arguments coming from game designers, gamers, critics, and scholars.

First to jump in the ring was game designer Kellee Santiago, who felt that Ebert was out of touch. “It doesn’t seem that Ebert has played many, if any video games. And if that’s the case, then his opinion on the subject isn’t relevant anyways,” claimed Santiago. The two squared off multiple times in the blogosphere with Santiago, concluding that Ebert’s argument was weak because he defined art as, “usually the creation of one artist.” In her Tedx Talk, Santiago cited two examples, “Flower” and “Braid,” as having been created and developed by individuals. In Ebert’s defense, Chris Baker, a blogger for Wired.com wrote, “And no one can say Ebert doesn’t understand or value the open-endedness of games, or the joy of exploring a compelling virtual world.” Baker offers up an example of a 1994 review of the game, Cosmology of Kyoto, where Ebert wrote, “The graphics are hauntingly effective, using a wide-screen landscape format. The individual characters are drawn with vivid facial characteristics, a cross between the cartoons of medieval Japanese art and the exaggerations of modern Japanimation. The speaking voices are filled with personality, often taunting, teasing, or sexy. There is a sense, illusory but seductive, that one could wander this world indefinitely. This is a wonderful game.” So the question was not Ebert’s ability to appreciate games, it had more to do with how he defined art. Ebert’s felt, “Art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist… Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion. Not a smorgasbord of choices.”

Tagged and ready to rumble, Clive Barker, a novelist and video game auteur said, “I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art, if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written “Romeo and Juliet’ as a game, because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn’t taken the damn poison. If only he’d have gotten there quicker.” Then Ebert got trapped in a corner, when he referenced Andy Warhol. “I mentioned that a Campbell’s soup could be art. I was imprecise. Actually, it is Andy Warhol’s painting of the label that is art. Would Warhol have considered Clive Barker’s video game “Undying” as art? Certainly. He would have kept it in its shrink-wrapped box, placed it inside a Plexiglas display case, mounted it on a pedestal, and labeled it “Video Game.” In his attempt to personalize his attack, Ebert comes across shortsighted by not understanding Warhol’s relation to other twentieth-century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was part of the Dadaist Movement that had only one rule: Never follow any known rules. Dada was born in Europe in response to the horror of World War I. It was created to promote an emotional reaction from the viewer (typically shock and outrage). In using Warhol as an example Ebert misses the bigger picture. Gaming unlike cinema is still in its early stages of development. The question of whether or not it is truly an art form may be premature. As a whole it reflects the same model as Hollywood with its thirst for popular, blockbuster-like titles. But very similar to independent film it is beginning to exhibit more sophisticated storylines and concepts that fully exploit the interactive medium. In recognition of this trend, the British author, journalist and critic Steven Pool writes, “A beautifully designed videogame invokes wonder as the fine arts do, only in a uniquely kinetic way. Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand, because it can move, it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way which photographs or drawings can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture.”

It’s been seven years since Roger Ebert’s stated that, “Video games can never be art.” Huge things have happened since then. For example, in 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court recognized video games as art. According to the ruling, “They deserve the same First Amendment protections as books, comics, plays and all the rest.” This year, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art will open an exhibit titled, “The Art of Video Games.” Chris Melissinos, the curator believes that, “The responsibility of this exhibition is to enlighten and inform in terms of what games really are.” Visitors will get to play video games while looking at them through a historical platform. To add another dimension to the exhibit, the Smithsonian selected their games by launching an “Art of Video Games Voting Site.” Participants were offered a chance to vote for 80 games from a pool of 240 proposed choices in various categories. The show will span many eras from Pac-Man to Flower and everything in-between. Will this exhibit set the record straight once and for all? Perhaps it will, but what has become evident is that when it comes to art and in this case gaming, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.”

Works Cited

“The Art of Video Games.” American Art. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/winninggames/>.

Baker, Chris. “Roger Ebert, Game Reviewer | Game|Life | Wired.com.” Wired.com. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2007/07/roger-ebert-g-1/>.

“Clive Barker’s Undying – GameSpot.com.” Video Games, Video Game Reviews – GameSpot. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://www.gamespot.com/clive-barkers-undying/>.

“Faster Forward – A Conversation with Video Game Exhibition Curator Chris Melissinos.” Blogs & Columns, Blog Directory – The Washington Post. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/qa_with_video_game_exhibition.html>.

Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Pub., 2000. Print.

“Roger Ebert’s Journal.” Chicago Sun-Times Blogs. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/>.

“TEDxUSC – Kellee Santiago – 3/23/09 – YouTube.” YouTube – Broadcast Yourself. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww>.

“Thatgamecompany | TGC » Kellee Santiago.” Thatgamecompany | TGC. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://thatgamecompany.com/about/kellee-santiago/>.

“Why Video Games Are Indeed Art – Our Far-flung Correspondents.” Chicago Sun-Times Blogs. Web. 06 Feb. 2012. <http://blogs.suntimes.com/foreignc/2011/04/video-games-are-art.html>.

Much of this question is rooted in what you consider as art, the age old question that has yet to really be answered.  Many artists are taught that art is everything and anything.  From Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas we have been challenged to transform our understanding of art as artists explore a range of new concepts.  Yet, each artist was just that, an artist.  That is to say, when artists are creating new works or considering new forms of media they are concerned with subject matter and aesthetic value.  You will not find one piece of artwork in a major gallery in which the artists did not take time to contemplate most if not every single aesthetic aspect in their piece.  From content to color palette, artists are mindful and care about all of their artistic decisions. Edward Shanken’s unpublished essay Contemporary Art and New Media: Toward a Hybrid Discourse? notes that new media art does not reflect a solid understanding of art history or aesthetic and theoretical progressions in mainstream contemporary art.  Fortunately, many pieces of new media art are heavily concerned with subject matter or content, which is a key component of art.

One piece that I feel lacks a certain concern with aesthetic values, but has both an interesting and sound subject is Josh On’s piece They Rule made in 2001.  It explores corporate power relationships between major companies in the US such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola.  The companies are displayed as businessmen or businesswomen holding a briefcase.  As Christine Paul notes, “They Rule is a reminder that data access on the Internet is a two-way street: the project subverts the use of the Web as a mere marketing tool that turns us into transparent customers by making visible the intricate web of relationships between corporate entities and the ruling elite.“ (Paul 205).  They Rule is an extremely intriguing and innovative new media project that has a visual representation to help us understand.  However, I do think that the visual representation could have taken the work a step further and really made it into a strong piece of art.

Another work that I think includes more consideration for aesthetic values while portraying an interesting subject is W. Bradford Paley’s TextArc made in 2002.  This work represents an entire text on a single page and lets you to filter through it.  This work is visually compelling and is created by the use of new media.  Thus, I think this is quite a success for what we consider new media art.

When new media artwork lacks aesthetic consideration and deep contemplation of subject matter, I believe that it truly fails to become art. Thus, to the beginning question, I think for a new media work to be considered as art and not just a project or interactive game, it has to pay close attention to aesthetic values.  If it doesn’t, what’s to stop someone from saying that a professor’s keynote lecture on global warming is art?  There has to be something more than just a strong concept with some type of visual representation for a work to be considered art, in my opinion.

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Print.