Keep in mind the interdisciplinary nature of New Media topics when beginning and expanding your research. It is helpful to make a list of terms and concepts as well as the names of specific artists and artworks.
If you need to clarify a concept or find its related terms, use the Oxford Art Online database as a starting point.
Noise, Water, Meat by
This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it--to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries.
New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art by
The collections of museums, galleries and online art organisations are increasingly broadening to include more new media art. Because new media is used as a means of documenting, archiving and distributing art, and because new media art might be interactive with its audiences, this highlights the new kinds of relationships that might occur between audiences as viewers, participants, selectors, taggers or taxonomisers. New media art presents many challenges to the curator and collector, but there is very little published analytical material available to help meet those challenges. This book fills that gap. Drawing from the editor's extensive research and the authors' expertise in the field, the book provides clear navigation through a disparate arena. The authors offer examples from a wide geographical reach, including the UK, North America and Asia and integrate the consideration of audience response into all aspects of their work. The book will be essential reading for those studying or practicing in new media, curating or museums and galleries.
Avant-Garde Videogames by
An exploration of avant-garde games that builds upon the formal and political modes of contemporary and historical art movements. The avant-garde challenges or leads culture; it opens up or redefines art forms and our perception of the way the world works. In this book, Brian Schrank describes the ways that the avant-garde emerges through videogames. Just as impressionism or cubism created alternative ways of making and viewing paintings, Schrank argues, avant-garde videogames create alternate ways of making and playing games. A mainstream game channels players into a tightly closed circuit of play; an avant-garde game opens up that circuit, revealing (and reveling in) its own nature as a game. We can evaluate the avant-garde, Schrank argues, according to how it opens up the experience of games (formal art) or the experience of being in the world (political art). He shows that different artists use different strategies to achieve an avant-garde perspective. Some fixate on form, others on politics; some take radical positions, others more complicit ones. Schrank examines these strategies and the artists who deploy them, looking closely at four varieties of avant-garde games: radical formal, which breaks up the flow of the game so players can engage with its materiality, sensuality, and conventionality; radical political, which plays with art and politics as well as fictions and everyday life; complicit formal, which treats videogames as a resource (like any other art medium) for contemporary art; and complicit political, which uses populist methods to blend life, art, play, and reality--as in alternate reality games, which adapt Situationist strategies for a mass audience.
