New and
hybrid approaches drive innovation. Artists working within this area tend to
abandon strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of media or approach in
favor of utilizing whatever means necessary to best accomplish their vision.
The genre generally encompasses artworks created with new media technologies,
including for example, digital art, computer graphics or animation, and virtual
or Internet art. It encompasses issues surrounding major technological
innovations that have shaped the course of our visual history, the printing
press, the camera, video, and the computer and internet. Historical precedent
can be drawn from Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, and Fluxus.
Strategies may focus on the political ramifications of technology around issues
of identity and accessibility, commercialization, privacy, and the public
domain, importance of the physical object in the digital world.
Appropriating
mass-produced images from popular culture, Kota Ezawa creates digital
animations to decontextualize iconic pictures that comment on their symbolic
power as well as how images shape our collective memories. In City of Nature, for example, he
appropriates excerpts from popular films including Jaws, Deliverance, and Brokeback Mountain, among others. By
translating these filmic moments into simplified drawings, he utilizes new
media methods such as combining stills and sequences into animated video.
Conceptually, Ezawa addresses nature and culture in mass media by relying on
the moving image to relay information.
Other
artists in New Media include Ian
Bogost, Joan Jonas, and Andy Schuessler, among others.