1. A museum of new media art should incorporate how the past is seen in the present and how the present can demonstrate what can be seen in the future. New innovations demonstrate how things are changing and will change in the future.

2. A museum of new media art should include interactive pieces where the audience can experience, create, and be part of the art piece. Both the artist and the audience should be credible to the artwork.

3. A museum of new media art should be easily accessible for everyone to experience. There should not be any requirements or limitations to what the audience can experience.

4. A museum of new media art should allow the audience to make donations instead of charging to see the art pieces because this would be some kind of restriction to the audience. This includes real museums and virtual museums.

5. An online museum of new media art should include interactive pieces that the audience can experience. There should not only be video demonstrations, but the virtual museum needs the audience to create and be part of the art piece.

6. A museum of new media art should be categorized by genre where it makes it easier for the audience to have an idea of what they want to see live or search for virtually.

7. A museum of new media art needs to have original pieces that have never been seen before. This also includes remixing of past art pieces that use technology or new techniques to make it different from the original.

8. A museum of new media art should not include the author’s purpose for creating the art piece because the audience should be able to interpret and experience the art pieces without any guides that leads them to one direction.

9. An online museum of new media art should include archives of old and new art pieces organized by year and genre. People will be able to search for any type of art that is from the past and the present.

10. A museum of new media art should engage in the idea of new and changing technology that is used to create new art pieces through real museums and the Internet.

Artist: Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman

Title: Interactive Bar Tables

Location: Tmema

Date: 2004

Personal Web Page: http://www.flong.com/

URL: http://vimeo.com/2377926

The Interactive Bar Tables, created by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman in 2004, is an interactive installation for environments like cafés. This was one of the earliest examples of “multi-touch surface” interactive art. The table creates a natural habitat of digital organisms that move “with playful curiosity” when someone touches the surface of the table. They also gather around drinking glasses viciously and assemble around anything that “enters their world.” You have the power to have it follow every finger movement or send it to other directions. When they are left alone, they go back to their natural environment. Do not be afraid to interact with these creatures!

Artist: Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman

Title: Re: Face Anchorage Version

Location: Anchorage East High School

Date: 2010

Personal Web Page: http://www.flong.com/

URL: http://goo.gl/2WvuN

Re: Face Anchorage Version, created by Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman, is an interactive video installation that is displayed over the entryways of Anchorage East High School, Alaska. Students have their faces recorded. On four large LCD screens, it recombines individuals’ mouths, eyes, noses, and brows through brief video slices. Since Anchorage East High School is one of the most diverse student populations in the US, Re: Face Anchorage Version represents this “melting pot.” The mixture of the student’s faces also demonstrates the personalities and genetic traits of the students, which projects the schools character towards the public.

Artist: David Rokeby

Title: Long Wave

Location: Allen Lambert Galleria

Date: 2009

Personal Web Page: http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html

URL: http://goo.gl/Fxphn

  Long Wave is a site specific installation created by David Rokeby. It is a 380 foot long, 60 foot high sculpture that traces a helix through the entire length of the Allen Lambert Galleria, Brookfield, Toronto. The helixis constructed from 63 large red spheres, which hangs from the ceiling and resembles the length of a radio wave in the “short-wave radio band.” Long Wave is a representation of our communication period of our wireless surroundings, WiFi transmissions, etc. The shape of this helix also represents the backbone of a brontosaurus, which demonstrates the size and foundation of our communication.

Artist: Camille Utterback

Title: Aurora Organ

Location: St. Louis Park Showplace Theaters

Date: 2009

Personal Web Page: http://camilleutterback.com/

URL:  http://goo.gl/gyY7Z

The Aurora Organ, created by Camille Utterback, is a contemporary meditation and interactive sculpture, which translates the human presence into light. It is installed in the 80 ft tall ceiling of the Showplace Theaters. Moviegoers can simply create new experiences by touching or tapping a railing glass sensor, and a band of color is added to the corresponding column. This creates patterns of light on the LEDs. The pattern the light creates depends on how the individual touches the rail. If the participant holds the railing sensor, it creates a long streak. If the individual taps the railing sensor, it creates short sudden bursts. As Utterback describes, each column becomes an “amplified visual” mark of people’s presence and physical activity in the theater.

Rancière: spectator

In “The Emancipated Spectator,” Jacques Rancière focuses and relates spectatorship as a “bad thing” to theatre because of two main reasons (Rancière, 272). The first is that a person looks at an “appearance without knowing the condition,” which means that a person is simply looking without knowing the meaning behind the appearance (Rancière, 272). The second is that “looking is deemed the opposite of acting,” which means that there is no action between the spectacle and the appearance (Rancière, 272). One may think that the solution to the problem is to get rid of theatre, but what is needed is a theatre without spectators; what is needed is a theatre without ignorance (Rancière, 272). Rancière expresses this view through a pedagogical process where the schoolmaster’s main goal is to reduce “the gap between knowledge and ignorance” and spectators learn to be part of an active community (Rancière, 274). “Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality,” which means that one can be an active spectator in theatre if they understand and have their own views and interpretations (Rancière, 277). The “power of the equality of intelligences” is not when individuals are members of a collective body nor part of interactivity; it is when they have the power to “translate in their own way what they are looking at” (Rancière, 278).

Lanier: flatness

In “The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness,” Jaron Lanior expresses how the Internet is destroying the old media. The way this is seen is through “flat global structure” which is how cultural software engineers demonstrate a “brand-new tiny program” that uses the “same resources as every other one” (Lanior, 2). In other words, flatness is unoriginal by using old resources and leads to “blandness and meaninglessness” (Lanior, 3). Lanior describes the change of originality and creativity through first and second culture; the first-order culture is the new and original work, and the second-order culture is the “fragmentary reactions” of the first-order culture (Lanior, 3). Furthermore, wikipedia and comments about tv shows, games are being destroyed by the net (Lanior, 3). Although the net is destroyed old media, Lanior describes how technology like tuners, amplifiers, recordings have changed music, and this is the reason why one should have high expectations when encountering music on the web (Lanior, 7). Technology should be used to create new uses and not to use something that has already been made. Furthermore, one since Generation X, works have become the new normal; they have run out of “variations” and become “less creative” (Lanior, 8).

Foucault: panopticism

In “Discipline & Punish (1975), Panopticism,” Michel Foucault demonstrates Betham’s Panopticon, which is an “architectural figure” divided into cells with wide-open windows where a supervisor is in a central tower to keep an eye on a “madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy” (Foucault, 4). The main objective is to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 5). This means that one cannot be sure when one is being looked at. The visibility of the inmate is the “outline of the central tower,” but unverifiable explains never knowing whether he is being spied upon at any one moment (Foucault, 5). There are several ways Foucault compares the Panopticon to those in power. For example, it can be used as experiments on men where a director may spy on his employees under his orders like nurses, doctors, teachers etc (Foucault, 7). This means that power can be exercised to increase and multiply production, education, and public morality (Foucault, 10).

“The stable foundation has shifted and in some cases even fallen away, not only in art but also in politics, economics, agriculture, the sciences, history, climate, the credit system, and so on.” Arjen Mulder stated this in his short essay “The Age of Instability”, and what he means is that we live in an environment where everything you can think of is constantly changing and new things are being created through out the years. This clearly affects how we way we organize, display, and archive new media or anything we want to keep records of to preserve them for the future. Furthermore, the Internet is the solution of how we view new media arts. Most would come to a conclusion that we need structure, but instability does not always mean chaos! With instability, there is an innovation of art and culture that “sparks your imagination,” which leads to new creations of an “unknown outcome,” “self-organization, and “finding your own path.” It is important to consider the artist’s and the viewer’s perspective of what they believe a piece can be placed as. An artist can all of sudden create a new type of art, but how is that organized?

Although it is difficult to place the different kinds of new media art into single categories, it is important to preserve and display them for the viewers experience of today and for the experiences of the future. This is the reason why the Internet is the best way to organize, display, and the archive new media. There needs to be paths one can choose to know what type of art they are looking at. The way to do this is by letting people have ways of accessing the new media art. In the past there have been several art pieces that not even galleries were able to keep track of; some art pieces were never revealed or were even forgotten. As technology changes, art has taken advantage of it and integrated technology in the final creation. Johannes Birringer mentions in the assembled articles that dancing is known to be dancing among other moving bodies whether in a rehearsal studio, on stage, or in the street but has transformed with an opportunity to “explore interactive environments, virtual places, and integrated methods.” Art is changing and the way they are being displayed has to change too!

A specific way the Internet can organize new media art is by having virtual galleries. Within those galleries, the artist can “tag” what they believe their piece falls under. There are many perspectives of an art piece and having one category is absolutely NOT going to be effective and sufficient. In Manovich’s third proposition “New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software,” he states how the “principle of variability” may exist in potentially infinite different states. This is clearly saying that there will be several versions of a certain media art, which can be manipulated easily. Charlie Green mentions in “New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age” how institutions have failed to consider the long history of artist using new technologies in their work. As mentioned before, this is why the Internet would keep an archive of anything the viewer wants to search for. The importance of having this organization is to have the viewers experience and interpret what they believe the new media art is portraying. Overall, with the Internet as the primary source of organizing technology, the “weight of contact” can be spread across several distances and create various emotional reactions.

Arjen Mulder: The Age of Instability

Charlie Gere: New Media Art and the Gallery in the New Media Age

Johannes Birringer: Dance and Media Technologies

Lev Manovich: New Media from Borges to HTML

Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)

Author: Mark Twain

Edition: reprint

Publisher: Collectors Reprints Incorporated, 1885

Original from: the University of Michigan

Digitized: Jun 27, 2007

http://goo.gl/Kt0sa

A person encounters hyperlinks everywhere on the Internet, whether it is on the UCI school website, Facebook, online banking, Youtube, research papers, etc. A click on a word, phrase, picture, or video will take the user to an alternative site related to what they were already looking at. In the article, New Media from Borges to HTML, Lev Manovich demonstrates how new media has been evolving throughout the years. As a new reader, who has recently encountered Manovich’s perspectives about new media, it is essentially important that the hyperlinks are useful for further visual and further resources about the information provided. Manovich explains how new media is “modern art and computing technology after World War II” and demonstrates how even museums have also taken this new concept. I was virtually able to go to the New York Whitney Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to visually see what he meant.

Through Manovich 8 propositions, I was also able to learn more about digital computing and new media has developed faster techniques of algorithms in the 6^th proposition. Manovich explains the history of how art has been in technology and the ways human had to “manually” create images before computing came around. He starts off by introducing Henry Peach Robinson technique of putting joining multiple negatives to create single photographs, called photomontage. In the video presented within the hyperlink, it states that Robinson’s work was very controversial because the images were too painful. Manovich compares how the history explains what we do now. It is faster to use programs like Photoshop and algorithms like copy and paste to create such images. Overall, hyperlinks on the article gives the reader an opportunity to explore more on what they are given, rather than take the views and facts for what they are.

Even though the use of hyperlinks does make it easier for a person to encounter what they want in less than a second, I agree with Charlie Gere’s assertion that “The gallery has an important role to play in making this art visible, not just now but also in the future, when such work will be part of art history.” This is a way institutions can store physical arts where it can demonstrate “our culture archives” and how it has developed for the future. Now, the Internet has made it accessible for people to see art in various ways, but people do not receive the same kind of appreciation for the art and the artist. Galleries make it possible to make “art visible,” and we should preserve them for the future.

Very Nervous System (1982-1991) by David Rokeby from David Rokeby on Vimeo.

Dark Matter by David Rokeby (2010) from David Rokeby on Vimeo.

Since 1982, David Rokeby, from Toronto, Canada, is known to be an “installation artist.” An installation artist is three-dimensional works based on art that exists in a specific place where they were created. Furthermore, his artwork has been evolving throughout the years. According to the David Rokeby’s homepage, his first interest focused on the human body and perception systems, and then expanded to incorporate “videos, kinetic and static sculpture.”

Interpreting Rokeby’s works, one can see that they center around on how human motion relates to sounds. One of Rokeby’s most earliest and famous works is “Very Nervous System.” In this piece, Rokeby’s demonstrates the use of a computer, which translates the gestures of the human body into sounds (Dot Tuer). Furthermore, the combining of a logical computer and passionate movements creates elements in artistic ways. The body language and movement of his hands, fingertips, and legs in relation to the music demonstrate the “interface” of  “volume of space.”

Moreover, Rokeby continued to develop this kind of body motion and sound videos, but the pieces have evolved into more complex elements. In 2010, Rokeby presented “Dark Matter.” Installation is seen more clearly because the person is creating art in space. As mentioned in the video, the sounds were located close to the movements that the people made. “They were ‘painted’ into the space by hand.” Overall, the artist creates the sounds in space by painting in the empty room, which creates installation.

David Rokeby Research:

http://goo.gl/10eL

http://goo.gl/cbSiV

http://goo.gl/THoQy

http://goo.gl/DuYVm

Videos:

Very Nervous System: http://goo.gl/VTSCu

Dark Matter: http://goo.gl/81JZm