107-521 New Media Art

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth-year honours in art history.

This subject traces the development of new media art as a contested field of contemporary art practice incorporating media technologies. It introduces students to the activities of a diverse group of artists, scientists, poets, musicians, and theorists since the art and technology movement in the 1960s, including video installation and net.art. The subject begins with a pre-history of new media art, including the long history of immersion, Wagner's concept of the "total art work" (Gesamtkunstwerk) and Duchamp's dictum that the viewer completes the work of art. Students will examine the concept of interactivity, and its origins in avant-garde traditions at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a reaction to the widening gap between the mass media and the art audience. They will encounter key examples of electronic and digital art that will provide an awareness of how new media blurs the hierarchies separating art forms and the conventional distinctions between artwork and viewer. The subject will explore the implications of the performative nature of digital art, collaborative authoring, techniques of remediation, art and science crossovers, global audiences, institutional, curatorial and conservation issues, and the politics of virtual aesthetic experience in the age of the Internet. On completion of the subject students should be familiar with key issues in the history of international and Australian new media since the 1960s, and with developments of new media art theory over

A 5000 word essay 100% (due end of semester).

A subject reader will be available.