Evolving traditions: artists working in New Media

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Seth Thompson

A paradigm shift in the fields of art, entertainment and publishing is taking place. Non-linear writing, interactive storytelling, immersive environments and virtual reality are words that are beginning to seep into our everyday vocabulary. These words, once found only in the likes of science fiction programs such as Star Trek, are quickly becoming part of daily life with the advent of computer-based multimedia production tools and products known as "New Media." This latter term is difficult to define because it encompasses a constantly growing set of new technologies and ideas. Nevertheless, an important theme in "New Media" is the convergence of video, audio, text and interactivity in new and innovative ways.

Artists are forging a new medium with groundbreaking digital technologies, combining various art forms to create innovative interactive experiences. What drove these artists to depart from the conventional disciplines to use computer-based technology? From such diverse artistic backgrounds as painting, dance, music, bookmaking and writing, artists Mark Amerika, Toni Dove, Tennessee Rice Dixon and the dance theater company Troika Ranch have incorporated current computer technology into their work to enhance their artistic visions--pushing the boundaries of their respective disciplines into the medium now coined, "New Media."

Writer Mark Amerika began exploring the possibilities of the internet with the Alt-X Online Network (www.altx.com), a literary website he developed in 1993. Amerika also uses computer technology to investigate new forms of writing. In 2000, Amerika's most acclaimed internet art project Grammatron (www.grammatron.com) was one of the first websites to be included in the Whitney Biennial. When Amerika launched Alt-X, he had been publishing a journal called Black Ice and found the distribution of alternative books becoming increasingly difficult. He asserts: "I wanted to find an alternative distribution model and locate a preferably wider, larger audience. So I started experimenting with the internet as a network publishing model and not only were we able to succeed in finding that audience, [but] we started having a pretty strong influence on the development of internet culture because we were one of the first content sites on the internet." With the development of Alt-X, Amerika also began to see that publishing web pages containing music, images and hypertext links, enabled the site to become an exhibition medium as well. His internet art project Grammatron (www.grammatron.com) began as his third novel. After forty pages into writing the book, he realized that the web was a more appropriate medium for this type of endeavor. "I was interested in investigating the potential of multi or non-linear writing. I thought that the standard forms of writing, like the novel, were getting kind of old and boring." He uses hypertext to explore this form of literary work. Hypertext, usually associated with the web, enables the reader to follow associative paths through a collection of textual documents. Grammatron is a hypertext story about a character named Abe Golam who experiences information overload in an internet world.

The Grammatron project took four years to complete and was released in June 1997. According to Amerika, production on Grammatron began on "April 3, 1993, approximately one or two weeks before the release of Mosaic, the first graphical user interface browser like Netscape, or Microsoft Explorer. I think that it is significant because it goes to show that a number of us were actually trying to envision what internet art could be like if the technology was there. As a consequence, we had to wait for the technology to catch up with our ideas and our visions."

Artist Toni Dove finds "New Media" attractive because she doesn't have the artistic rules imposed on her by more traditional art mediums. Dove creates interactive video environments. One of her goals is to reexamine narratives and develop a new language that allows a viewer to participate in the construction of the story using a computer-based interactive environment. At first she was resistant to working in an interactive format because she felt it might be too limiting. In 1993, she agreed to collaborate with British playwright Michael McKenzie and went to the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada to create Archeology of a Mother Tongue, a virtual reality murder mystery installation. "It was a turning point for me because it was the first time that I started working directly with interactive structures. And I got very intrigued with the way in which media could be responsive and how you could use your body to connect with images on a screen." According to Dove, Archeology of a Mother Tongue significantly changed her work practice. "It was the beginning of a way of working that was taking me out of the more traditional kind of 19th century artist in a garret model, which I had been doing before and brought me more into the realm of collaborative practice."