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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Art

icon: chapterEditorial
Media art can only be conveyed by multimedia
icon: authorRudolf Frieling icon: authorDieter Daniels

«Media Art Net 1: An Overview of Media Art» is the first module published in the Net and is accompanied by this volume of text. This module will serve as a foundation for all later modules, and reacts at the same time to an additional paradox of mediation in the media: even those relevant websites that deal with media art still lacked up until now a comprehensive introduction to this subject. [more]more

preview image icon: chapterForerunners
Media → Art / Art → Media
Forerunners of media art in the first half of the twentieth century

icon: authorDieter Daniels

The mutual influences between media and art have started long before the popularization of television. There were technical and conceptual forerunners of media art in the early twentieth century,and there was radio which almost exploded into being in the 1920s -all of this shows the power wielded by these distribution and production instruments. [more]more
icon: chapterMassMedia
Television-Art or anti-art?
Conflict and cooperation between the avant-garde and the mass media in the 1960s and 1970s

icon: authorDieter Daniels

Television emerged and developed along tracks that had already been laid by the established mass media of film and radio. There was scarcely a phase when everything was open, allowing creative investigation to define the medium. In the following, three snapshots will provide examples of the developing relationship between art and television over three decades. [more]more
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preview image icon: chapterAudio
Audio Art
icon: authorGolo Föllmer

The three basic media techniques of transmission, storage and synthesis have helped to define artistic strategies dealing with sounds which go beyond the traditional notion of music and ask for a new terminology. [more]more
icon: chapterPerformance
Reality/Mediality
Hybrid Processes Between Art and Life

icon: authorRudolf Frieling

This essay deals with a broad spectrum of hybrid processes between art and life. Its examination of the concepts underlying Happening, Action and Performance art focuses on the question about the body-about the body along with its media interconnections as a field of both private and public action. [more]more
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preview image icon: chapterPerception
Technological Constructions of Space-Time
Aspects of Perception

icon: authorHeike Helfert

With the development of technical media of representation, these media also simultaneously moved into the scope of artistic debates. The use of audiovisual media and new communication technologies has introduced numerous new aspects to the conceptual and aesthetic engagement with questions of perception. [more]more
icon: chapterSociety
Social Technologies
Deconstruction, subversion, and the utopia of democratic communication

icon: authorInke Arns

This text explores the assumption that in a society increasingly influenced by media, an (artistic) change of media content or media structures can contribute significantly to democratizing society. The title, «Social Technologies,» is an attempt to pin down the ambivalent meaning of «(new) media» or «(new) technologies» as addressed by artists working with these media or technologies. [more]more
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preview image icon: chapterNarration
Virtual Narrations
From the crisis of storytelling to new narration as mental potentiality

icon: authorSöke Dinkla

Despite all of the intervening caesuras and interruptions, narration as a cultural practice seems to have experienced a virtual Renaissance at the end of the twentieth century. Strikingly, this can be felt with particular intensity in the electronic media. [more]more
icon: chapterImmersion
Immersion and Interaction
From Circular Frescoes to Interactive Image Spaces

icon: authorOliver Grau

Digital art is open, transient, interdisciplinary, multimedia, processual, discursive, concept- and context-dependent, and, in addition, is increasingly oriented toward interaction with the recipient. Within the evolving art genres, virtual art has begun to further dismantle the traditional tableau; this time, in favor of a processual model of art. [more]more
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preview image icon: chapterCommunication
Interaction, Participation, Networking: Art and Telecommunication
icon: authorInke Arns

The following description concentrates less on media-oriented or technical conceptions of interactivity than on those projects conducted from the 1960s onward that highlighted the idea of social, gregarious interaction. [more]more
icon: chapterMuseum
Form Follows Format
Tensions, Museums, Media Technology, and Media Art

icon: authorRudolf Frieling

The question of «formatting» and the devices for recording, saving, distribution, and presentation, with which artists continue to be confronted, provoke this aphorism from Kittler: «The typewriter writes, too.» [more]more
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preview image icon: chapterMilestones
Milestones of Media-Art
icon: authorRudolf Frieling icon: authorDieter Daniels

To make embarking on an involvement with the contents of formal and artistic parameters of media art more effective, we have selected a series of works representing the various approaches and ‹types› of media art. This panorama embracing historic and newer works of an exemplary character is not meant, however, to form a canon. Their quality as «milestones» is rather defined by the fact that these works offer themselves in a unique way to an online multimedia representation. [more]more