People have divided the development of news media into different stages according to the different media of communication - traditional newspapers with paper as the medium, radio with airwaves as the medium, and television based on the dissemination of television images, which are respectively called the first media, the second media, and the third media.
In May 1998, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed in the UN Committee on Information that while strengthening the traditional means of textual and audio-visual communication, the most advanced fourth media, the Internet, should be utilized. Since then, the concept of "fourth media" has been officially used.
The Internet media is called the "fourth media" to emphasize that it is the fourth largest news media that can transmit news information in a timely and extensive manner, just like newspapers, radio and television. In a broad sense, the "fourth media" usually refers to the Internet, however, the Internet is not only a media function to disseminate information, it also has the unique advantages of digitalization, multimedia, real-time and interactive delivery of news and information. Therefore, in a narrower sense, "fourth media" refers to networks based on the Internet as a transmission platform to disseminate news and information. The "fourth media" can be divided into two parts, one is the digitization of traditional media, such as the electronic version of the People's Daily, and the other is the birth of "new media" due to the convenience provided by the network, such as Sina.com.
Every technological advancement of mankind has brought about great changes in art, such as the development of perspective and geometry, which influenced Renaissance painting; the development of mineral and oil purification techniques, which influenced the bright and layered style of oil paintings in northern Europe; and the achievements of machine-produced pigments and optical research, which led to the development of light sketching and impressionism. In the 20th century, the greatest development between art and science and technology was the special influence of pictorial technology on the language of art.
Art not only creates visual wealth for the society, but also must think visually about the society and culture. Only in this way can art truly realize its function. Since the beginning of this century, along with the development of pop culture and the popularization of commercial TV programs, artists have begun to think about the visual acceptance of images and the way of life, and on the other hand, they have begun to engage in this kind of thinking and creation by using all kinds of image technologies, including photography, film, and TV. From the Futurists, photography and collage of ready-made images became an important way of artistic creation; from Nam June Paik of the Surge School, television began to be widely used as a new visual technology in personalized visual creation.
Throughout the 20th century, photography and television, and even movie film, were transformed from popular culture into media for artistic creation. Photography was originally a documentary and monumental tool, but artists took the technical techniques of posing and collage out of it, and combined them with the objectivity of the image itself to develop it into a uniquely personal narrative, resulting in surrealist photography, Cindy Sherman's fake "movie stills," and Jeff Wall's pseudo-"reality," to name just a few. "real" by Jeff Wall, to name a few. In video art, artists have combined the electronic medium of television to create "artistic television programs" that are different from popular television programs, resulting in Nam June Paik's "electronic paintings for television" and Douglas's "extended films. The result was Nam June Paik's "TV Electronic Painting" and Douglas's "Extended Movie" and so on.
II Just as photography and motion picture film were major visual technological developments at the turn of the last century, digital technology is a new visual technological development at the turn of a new century. Likewise, it is bound to affect the development of the visual arts.
Collage and the traditional darkroom processes of multiple exposures and compositing have been technically replaced by the more convenient and powerful digital image. Digital processing is a platter of graphics that is more technically sophisticated than the darkroom* process of the manual era. The power of photography comes from people's trust in its objectivity (although in fact its objectivity is questionable), the fantasy world of digital montage because of its seemingly objective and gained trust at the same time, buried a myriad of organs, attracting a long and repeated gaze, the objective image of the crisis of the collapse of a powerful tension between the real and the fake. Digital image is the processing of the picture after shooting, digital image makes the volume of the picture become infinite, so that it goes farther than traditional photography, and then there is the photo installation. In fact, the huge graphic space created by Barbara Krug is already a kind of installation "field".
In video art, digital technology has made it easy for video clips to share many of the fruits of cinematic aesthetics -- a variety of classic cinematic time manipulation techniques are applicable to video. For example, "flashback" is used as a flashback technique to reverse time and activate the memory inventory; slow-motion mirror slows down the time to emphasize the drama of subtle details; time splicing in the switching to change the narrative flow, cancel the causality and even hint at the simultaneity of the techniques; and fast-motion mirror intensely compresses the time and reduces the process of the event in order to strengthen its symbolic significance, etc. But the digitalization of time processing in video art has made it easy to share many achievements. However, the time processing of video has more flexibility in digitalization: the overlapping and cross-parallel relationships of multiple time dimensions created by various digital stunts such as picture-in-picture and multi-layer overlapping paintings have greatly enriched the traditional film language, and the intervention of three-dimensional animation modeling has made it possible for any whimsical idea to become a visual reality.
With the emergence of video and video installations, interactivity has become an advantage of video art over other traditional art media. The development of digital technology, which created the CD-ROM and the Internet, also made it easier to create the kind of interactivity that could be created with a number of television screens or expensive projection equipment.
Today's talk of multimedia art has become far more powerful than the linear evolution of movie narratives, combining video, sound, and text in a hypertext that can not only be linked to endless other texts, but can be accessed by a variety of paths, which has made the hypertext a labyrinth, and the interactivity it offers is almost limitless. From the concept of digital multimedia as currently envisioned, today's multimedia art is still only a rough embryo, and we have more possibilities to explore.
Multimedia means a sort of renaissance of synthesis for art. We know that the modernist period is a self-purification of various artistic disciplines in the ring, painting to exclude the literary and even the object to become some of the colors on the canvas, and ultimately went to the abstract painting. Music had to become the pure sound of the Surge, and in photography there was the Pure Shadow School. In ancient art, such as cathedrals, the way frescoes, sculpture, organs and architectural space worked in tandem to create a "field" of psychological atmosphere seems likely to reappear in multimedia. Just as the altarpiece in a church ceases to be mysterious when it is brought into the limelight of a museum, multimedia will once again bind the various arts together to create an integrated experience that is irreducible to its combined elements.
The traditional disciplinary training in the specialized arts is not enough for the competencies required for multimedia creation. This makes creation a collaboration between multidisciplinary talents, and coupled with what we've come to realize about digital works being reprocessed multiple times in distribution, multimedia likewise exacerbates the anonymity of individual authorship in the same way that the Homeric poems are not the personal writing of Homer. We have already seen this power of collective creation in the long credits of movies. On the other hand, it may also provide space for the emergence of da Vinci type of generalists. Multimedia art is an emerging variety of digital art that incorporates the strengths of many previous art forms, combining graphics, text, video, sound and interactivity in a way that can be described, discussed, laid out in a straight line or penetrated in a single line, and is extremely rich in possibilities. What we are exposed to today is only the tip of the iceberg that is being formed, and its potential has yet to be developed by more imaginative practices. Once interactive digital multimedia works are placed online to become network art, it will greatly enhance the degree of audience participation and will dramatically change our traditional concept of art. The vast majority of the art that appears on the web today is still something that lags behind the web itself. When you open online art-related sites and homepages, what you see are still oil paintings, Chinese paintings and sculptures. But these things are not really art with the network. Network art should of course be multimedia, of course, must be interactive, linking endless things.
Three Daniel Bell, a famous American cultural theorist, once said that from the second half of the 20th century, human beings have changed from reading and writing as the main way of receiving knowledge to watching and listening as the main way. Although Daniel Bell, as a representative of neoconservatism, held a skeptical and critical attitude towards the culture of seeing and hearing, it is obvious that the shift from reading words to reading images is an indisputable fact. The emergence of television, film, Internet and electronic reading materials that integrate sound, image and text will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the structure of human knowledge, cognitive and behavioral styles. Along with the inevitable trend of globalization, the way of cultural communication in the whole Chinese society has been developing towards pictorialization at an accelerated pace since China's reform and opening up.
The social function of culture and art requires us to respond to this trend of image reading. There are no wonder that there are two ways to respond, one is to develop technology and visual style, and the other is to think about the characteristics of the era of image reading in an artistic way and visual art theory, and convey this thinking in a way that is in line with the visual acceptance of this era. Therefore, the introduction of digital image art into contemporary art is of special significance. Artists' engagement with digital media often draws on a wealth of artistic resources, all of which can open up new possibilities for the use of digital technology in both pure and applied art. Their time inevitably has positive complementary implications with commercial digital technology companies. Compared with commercial digital technology companies that are subject to market constraints, the artists' time has a certain degree of foresight, exploration and scholarship. The existing artistic resources in art history can enable digital technology to produce richer and more peculiar visual results, which satisfy the growing social and spiritual needs and enrich our social life. On the other hand, digital technology, as a means of artistic expression, is utilized between visual art and practical art at the same time. So in incorporating digital influence into art time is undoubtedly an exchange pipeline between these two. It can effectively convert purely individual visual creations into social visual products, and at the same time, it can systematically and effectively convert the visual phenomena that have already appeared in society into resources for individual visual creations.
What we call high technology today is in fact a relative concept, i.e., every era has its own era of high technology. Neolithic is high-tech for old stone tools; bronze is high-tech for stone tools; coal and iron is high-tech for the past; industrialization is high-tech for its previous era; and information technology is high-tech for any previous historical era. Therefore, the so-called high-tech, is human in the development, continue to discover, invented, more superior than before, more practical technology.
● Has new media art matured in Europe and America?
In the 1960s, the information revolution made the personal computer the main form of computer, and artists who mastered portable photographic and video equipment began to use this media for artistic expression, thus the beginning of new media art. in the early 1970s, many popular television stations in Europe and the United States have set up experimental television programs, trying to accept experimental art works in the popular television network, and provide an experimental place to combine new technologies with artistic trends. and art trends. These experimental television centers, which provided artists with the latest equipment and the opportunity to work with technicians, directly contributed to many refreshing electronic visions, creating the first generation of masters of video art, while also stimulating the creative use of new technologies. For example, in 1973, video artist NAN JUN PAIK worked with engineer Abbey to develop the synchronized mixer, which today is one of the basic features of television editing.In the late 1970s, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States, among others, reduced funding for experimental programs on popular television in favor of direct funding for artists, and the National Endowment for the Arts began sponsoring nonprofit media arts centers. Offering a more democratic approach than television and greater access to new digital technologies, these media centers created video works that were less likely to be broadcast on television networks and exhibited in museums and galleries. As a result, artists began to consider combining electronic media with traditional visual art spaces, which led to the maturation of video installations.
From the 80's, video art in a variety of international art exhibitions in the limelight, it is a powerful new technology, with the traditional media can not compete with the sensitivity, comprehensiveness, interactivity and a strong sense of the scene, in the international art exhibitions frequently debut, and become with the easel art, the installation of art and driving the main art medium. 90's, the world's major art museums, not only have organized special video exhibitions, but also successive held special video exhibitions, but also successively set up a video department or develop a video plan. Art institutions around the world regularly organize video festivals to promote the dissemination and exchange of new media art. In recent years, due to the increasing maturity of personal computers, many works have appeared in the form of interactive multimedia CD-ROMs, and the 1998 Bonn Video Festival set up a special award for multimedia works, and Internet works are also booming.
Today, new media art has developed into a large family of single-frequency videotape works, video installations, multimedia CD-ROMs and Internet art. A variety of training, service and research institutions have also come into being to go along with it. Training centers such as the European EDA, research institutions such as France's Pierre-Charles Faye International Film and Television Creation Center, the United Kingdom's LUX CENTER, Germany's ZKM and so on. There are also many semi-profit production centers that are open to artists at levels below commercial rates. A great deal of funding for new media art comes from the cultural funds of high-tech companies, such as the Berlin Video Festival financed by Apple Computer, the Hamburg Video Festival financed by Siemens, and the technical part of Documenta Kassel sponsored by IBM and SONY. Support for new media art enhances the cultural image of the company, demonstrates the artistic appeal and technical potential of new media, and creates a virtuous circle between new media art and new technology.
With the support of the media industry and relevant governmental organizations, many media art utopias have been established one after another, among which the most famous ones are "ZKM" (CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA) located in Karlsruhe, Germany, "AEC" (AEC) located in Linz, Austria, and "ZKM" (CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA), which is a new media art center located in Kasturba, Germany. "ZKM (CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA) in KARLSTUHE, AEC (ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER) in LINZ, Austria, and ICC (INTER COMMUNICATION CENTER) in TOKYO, JAPAN, with the aim of promoting the dialogue between contemporary art and science. ZKM was founded in 1990 and officially started its operation in October 1997. ZKM is the first and only museum in the world with the theme of INTERACTIVE ART. Its aim is to create a large laboratory and media city that combines art and technology, a "new Bauhaus" that will initiate a new visual movement. The idea of ZKM came from LOTHAR SPAETH, a local German politician who wanted to set up a research and development center for art and media technology, especially visual imaging and music journalism. He wanted to set up a research and development organization for art and media technology, especially for visual images and music journalism, and chose Klotz, the former founder of the Frankfurt State Museum of Architecture, as the project's facilitator and director. The museum, which focuses on the development of media creation, collections, exhibitions and the promotion of German science and culture, has been organizing the "MULTIMEDIALE" biennial of multimedia art since 1992 to showcase its media art collection and the works of internationally renowned media artists and center artists.
From the development of new media art in Europe and the United States, we can clearly see that the creation of this form of art, the beginning of the commercial interests closely linked together, so it is more not to show the art, but to show the new technology products, to visit this new media art exhibition, giving people a feeling more like visiting the commodity fair.
● Are we ready?
It is human nature to love the new and hate the old. Creating new technologies and utilizing them is the inevitable progress of human society. Under the double impact of China's IT industry and European and American new media art, China's new media art has begun to start in an almost hazy state.
New media art is not only unfamiliar to the Chinese public, but also not fully understood and recognized by Chinese artists. However, like the occurrence and development of all things in the world, new media art does not wait for you to fully understand and accept it before it enters your world. Whether you like it or not, it always breaks through the door according to its own laws. The development of new media art in China began around the end of the 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, a number of better works and mature artists began to appear. in September 1996, China's first video art exhibition entitled Phenomenon and Image was held at the gallery of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. The exhibition included a dozen video installations and a few videotapes, focusing on the first generation of Chinese video art pioneers. The exhibition received tremendous response both at home and abroad, and was covered at great length by the local media, with Literature and Art Newspaper naming the event as one of the top ten news stories in Chinese art that year. The exhibition was positioned by many critics as an important milestone in Chinese contemporary art.
In 1997, several solo exhibitions consisting purely of video art emerged in Beijing, such as Wang Gongxin's Solo Exhibition, Song Dong's Seeing Video Art Exhibition, and Qiu Zhijie's Solo Exhibition of Luo Zhi: Five Video Installations. This signaled that Chinese new media artists not only became the focus of attention as a creative community, but also began to impact the contemporary Chinese art market as individuals. More influenced artists began to devote themselves to video art creation, and their achievements were reflected in the "97 Chinese Video Art Observation Exhibition". By now, video art had become a hot topic in the Chinese art world, and the Chinese Art Yearbook of the 1990s devoted a chapter to the rise of video art. At the same time, the activity of Chinese video art attracted the attention of the international art world, and the works of Chinese new media artists began to appear frequently in important media art festivals around the world. With the development of the IT industry and the cheap and popularized editing devices on personal computers, not only did video art flourish further, but more artists began to explore interactive multimedia art and network art.
New media art has been in China for only a decade or so counting, but it has developed and grown at a very impressive rate, as has the foundation from which it was generated - new media, including sound, light, electricity and the IT industry, according to Barbara Langdon, director of MOMA's video department: "The vibrancy of video art in China is the beginning of a new circle drawn after the closing of the circle of new media art in the West." Although we don't know how to define new media art more accurately, and no matter what kind of opinionated comments there are now, and no need to worry about how history will look back on the development of China's new media art, China's new media art in order to draw a good circle that has just begun, in order to make a good start, is working hard, and moving forward.
● How should we define new media art?
Roy Ascott, a pioneer of new media art, said that the most distinctive qualities of new media art are connectivity and interactivity. Understanding new media art creation needs to go through five stages: connection, integration, interaction, transformation and emergence. First, one must connect and become fully involved (not just watching from a distance), interact with the system and others, which leads to the transformation of the work and consciousness, and finally to the emergence of new images, relationships, thoughts and experiences. When we generally speak of new media art, we are mainly referring to circuit transmission and creation incorporating computers. However, this media, based on silicon crystals and electronics, is now merging with biological systems and concepts derived from molecular science and genetics. The most innovative new media art will be the combination of "dry" silicon computer science and "wet" biology. This fledgling new media art has been dubbed "MOIST MEDIA" by Roy Ascott.
There are many forms of new media art, but there is only one thing that they all have in common, and that is that the users are involved in changing the image, the shape, and even the meaning of the work through direct interaction with the work. They trigger the transformation of the work in different ways - touch, spatial movement, vocalization, and so on. Whether the interface with the work is a keyboard, a mouse, a light or sound sensor, or some other more complex, sophisticated, or even invisible "board", the relationship between the viewer and the work is still primarily one of interaction. Connectivity is about transcending the barriers of time and space and connecting people from all over the world. In these cyberspaces, users can take on a variety of identities at any time, searching databases and information archives in distant places, learning about foreign cultures, and creating new communities.
BENJAMIN WEIL, director of the New Media Department of the Center for Contemporary Art Research in the United Kingdom, who curated the "New Media Exhibition of Digital Art" in Shanghai in 1998, believes that: art works need to be put forward firstly as the artist's concept, and then the technology should come up with the most skillful and clever solution to complete it. Art works are related to everyone's way of thinking, and creations driven by concepts are artistic creations, while creations realized only through technology cannot be called artistic creations. This precisely clarifies the relationship between artistic creation and the use of technology in new media art. 1996, ETIME magazine once explored the difference between the concepts of NETART and ART IN NET, which firstly depended on whether it was the technology or the artist's conception that effectively defined and influenced the creation of art. The former is technical, while the latter emphasizes the humanistic conceptual nature of creation, just as a similar debate took place in the early days of VIDEO ART, whether it was the conceptual use of technology or the use of technology that served as a pure criterion for the categorization of art.
Internet art can offer the viewer many different experiences, such as works that utilize text and performance in combination to interpret each other's work, and offer the viewer the opportunity to make and **** the work together. Unlike traditional art, cyber art allows works to communicate directly with a wider audience. In some international cyber art exhibitions, a method of displaying works called WEB ARCHITECTURE is provided, where the audience is guided and led by the artist to look at the works, and the artist introduces the creative intention of the works, and art critics can also comment on the works at the same time. In the whole process of visiting the web architecture, the audience's online behavior will not be too different from the actual situation, just like we usually visit other art exhibitions.
As far as the art itself is concerned, new media art has its roots in the conceptual art of the 1960s, as well as by the early futuristic manifestos, Dada-style behavior and the representative performance art of the 1970s. Communication and collaboration have become the focus of artists' attention in the creation of new media art, as they continue to explore new modes of behavior and new media in an attempt to discover the possibility of creating new thinking, new human experiences, and even new worlds. Many artists are y interested in involving the audience in their works, and the definition of the work of art itself is no longer determined by its physical form, but more by the process of its formation. In short, the fascination with the metaphors and paradigms of the new sciences throughout the twentieth century, especially quantum physics at the turn of the century and neuroscience and biology at the end of the century, greatly stimulated the imagination of artists.
● Was art integrated into technology, or were both integrated into commercialization?
However, there are also questions that are perplexing and confusing. Whether it is Roy Ascott or Benjamin Weil, they seldom talk about the artist's artistic creation, but more about the technical application and mastery of new media, as well as the market of new media art, which gives people an illusion that the most important thing about new media art is not the artistic creation, but how to guide the art of applying new technology to capture the market. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that new media art is inseparable from commercialization as soon as it is born. Roy Ascott believes that for the artists of the 21st century, the problem of construction is more important than the problem of presentation. He says: "Interest in the Internet, bioelectronics, wireless networks, intelligent software, virtual reality, neural networks, genetic engineering, molecular electronics, robotics, etc., is not only about the creation and circulation of our work, but also about new definitions of art, and about 'emergence. AESTHETIC OF APPARITION, as well as interactivity, connectivity and transformation. The aesthetics of 'emergence' replaces the old 'aesthetics of form' (AESTHETIC OF APPEARANCE) - which was concerned only with the appearance of an object and with certain concrete and absolute values. absolute values. The new AESTHETIC OF COMING-INTO-BEING, however, seeks to interact with the unseen forces of the world through the transformative evolutionary techniques of technological culture. "
He added: "The truly creative digital artist is not one who will use new technology, like picking a cooking method from a recipe, but rather one who will use new technology to expand the market, test the limits of technology, and then enable its transformation. So we are looking for intelligent machines and systems that are highly responsive, that can even anticipate our needs, and that exhibit a degree of self-awareness (but not artificial awareness). So how does the artist function in a post-biological culture? We must expand to find new sources of funding and supporters. The old market, dominated by dealers and galleries, is incapable of dealing with an art that is not all flash in the pan, but is constantly moving, redefining and transforming itself. We seem to be more receptive to the new discoveries and experiments of science than to the traditions of art and the closed paradigms it has created. At the same time, the intimacy of human relationships in interactive communication systems and the interconnectedness of the central intelligence of the global network implies the emergence of a new form of spirituality. We need to build meaningful alliances with scientists, high techs, and corporations that not only challenge and test our creativity and imagination, but also offer us the possibility of weaving and even realizing our fantasies. If these enterprises do not already exist, then we must invent them. After all, in terms of investing in pure ideas and innovative behavior, Silicon Valley start-ups bear a striking resemblance to IPOs (Initial Public Offering) and to cultural and conceptual art! And as we digital, post-biological artists invest intellectually and financially in our work, we will create new patterns of behavior, new social organizations, relationships between mind and technology, and symbiotic relationships between the body and bionic, telecommunication systems."
From Roy Ascott's talk above, we seem to get the impression that new media art will gradually be integrated into media technology; that new media artists will be transformed into media technologists or replaced by media technologists; that new media art will become more commercialized; and that new media art will exist for the sake of the existence of media technology, and develop for the sake of the development of media technology. This is the reason for calling people perplexed and confused. However, no matter what the future direction of new media art will be, it is bound to exist and develop with the development of IT industry and INTERNET. We don't have to rush to give new media art what kind of conclusion.
New technology will continue to develop rapidly, the influence and participation in art and design will become more and more in-depth, art and science **** the same role in our lives, or the boundaries between art and science will become more and more fuzzy, which may be a reality that can not be avoided. However, we should not equate art and science, thinking that new technologies will make art into science or science into art. Technology pursues uniformity, standardization, and stereotyping, because only in this way can it meet the mass production of industrialization; art pursues personalization, originality, and dissimilarity, because only in this way can it satisfy the aesthetic interests of human beings. We can take a new technology as a means of creating art, we can not take a new art as a method of technical invention.