Digital Art & Literature Seminar

1. The website http://rhizome.org/ supports new media art and literature, while http://artport.whitney.org supports two types of new media art: Internet and digital arts. In Internet art, artists use the Internet as its primary medium. In digital art, however, the art is also created via computer but Internet is not required for its creation.

When looking at some of the artwork, a few seemed interesting to me. The Battle of Algiers by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin (http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/battleofalgiers/BattleofAlgiers.shtml#) is an example of an original artwork. It works as a response to an Italian movie with same name that deals with the Algerian nationalist struggle for independence. It is interesting how the cells intersect and create a video that shows each side’s tactics in the film, however I find it to be somewhat disturbing to watch it.

I also like the idea that Grégory Chantonsky had when creating Flussgeist (http://incident.net/works/islanders/). He uses small satellite images together to demonstrate that people from different sides of the world are now connected through the Internet. Space is not conceived as it once was.

2. New Media Art referes to art created with new media technologies (computer graphics, animation, the Internet, robotics, biotechnologies etc) while digital art refers more specifically to the new media art created with a computer. Internet art, however, uses the internet as its primary medium.