Mark Tribe has done a spectacular job explicating the origins, history and accomplishments of New Media Art already. I don’t think reiterating the facts he has presented so succinctly is going to serve any purpose apart from making this review a boring read, so instead, I’m going to focus on a few distinctive moments from “New Media Art – Introduction” that expanded the scope within which I previously viewed works of New Media Art.
After taking a class termed “Women in New Media Art” last semester under Maria Fernandez [an extremely passionate art historian], sighting names of works I have reviewed in extensive detail (including Mouchette and My Boyfriend Came Back From The War) under the subtexts that Tribe mentions them in was an interesting chance for me to rethink the ideas behind these works.

To provide a basic summary, Tribe’s writing focuses on the advent of New Media Art and analyses where it stands with regard to the historical and present art movement, and its intersections with/development from different forms of artistic media. He begins with describing the “art historical antecedents” of this wide movement, which includes inspirations ranging from Dada and Pop art to Conceptual and Video Art.

Personally, I found the political conditions behind New Media Art very intriguing;
how after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “artists in that region had a unique perspective on the Internet’s dot-com era transformation – they were living in societies making their transition from Socialism to Capitalism, a phenomenon that in many ways mirrored the privatization of the internet.” Tribe recognizes 3 developments that drew artists to New Media from other disciplines; (i) the emergence of a global art scene (aided by the internet and also enhancing the utilization of the internet as a means of viewing art and acquiring knowledge of global happenings, (ii) advancements in information technology, and (iii) familiarity of computing to a rising generation.

After a brief account of the beginnings of the New Media Art movement, he progresses to categorize the defining themes/tendencies of NMA movement, providing a plethora of new media artworks for viewers to research in the process. I am particularly interested in the concept of hacktivism (hacking + socio-political activism) and the inventive ways in which a variety of artists have explored concepts of surveillance and identity as they unfold on the internet. More on this soon.

There are five focal “themes” that Tribe categorizes NMA works in.
The first is collaboration, in which he states that by working in either ad-hoc groups or long-term partnerships, New Media artists “challenge the romantic notion of the artist as a solitary genius”. When I initially researched works in this field, I started out by analyzing works by independent women artists that focused on expressing feminine/sexual individuality that older and traditional forms of art, with their virtual ‘cartels’ of white men in the forefront did not allow them to create (Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen is a concrete example). Contrasting (or rather, complimenting) this notion of New Media art as an outlet for individuals/ marginalized groups that did not gain access to “higher” art institutions with the idea that NMA is an arena for collaboration gave me a new perspective on the field. VNS Matrix’s Cyberfeminist Manifesto For The 21st Century is perhaps my favourite collaborative digital project, as its originality and social relevance is as succinct and purposeful as it is raw, provocative, and dramatic.

The second and third are termed “From Appropriation to Open Source” and “Corporate Parody” respectively. As the titles suggest. Tribe addresses New Media artists’ tendency to “copy” and “paste” in their process of borrowing found images, sounds, and text through the influx of internet technology and web-sharing, how this process generated a much more restrictive regime of intellectual property laws and policies than ever before, and how these restrictions eventually paved the way for alternative models such as open source software (an approach to developing computer applications in which a program’s source code is made freely available to a distributed network of programmers who develop features and fix problems”). While Tribe exemplifies Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds to portray how artists used appropriated materials to their advantage, open-source software now poses a higher risk of being misused as a method of communication and encoding amongst software engineers, as is evident through recent developments in Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence ventures. Under the theme of “corporate parody”, Tribe illustrates through examples a segment of artistic activism against corporate structures and capitalistic commercialism.

Since activism and identity are the two primary themes/’tendencies’ underlying NMA that intrigue me the most, I focused more on the part of the article that talks about these considerations. (I also learned a new word! ‘Hacktivism’ sounds pretty sinister before you know what it’s about). Tribe quotes Brian Harvey in claiming that a hacker (far removed from the stereotypical image of a lonesome, sadistic computer geek as is iconized by mass media) is “more like an artist a criminal”. In a context where a hacker can be viewed not as a villain but perhaps as an inventor of new data in pre-existing domains or programs, it becomes easier to synthesize a possibility of digital artist utilizing ‘hacking’ as a powerful tool to intervene in digital spaces they believe require artistic, social, and/or political intervention, thus aiding in concretizing the concept of “hacktivism” (hacking + activism). In a day and age that is governed by and engulfed in the use of technology and digital imagery to forward information, ideas, and propaganda, several artists have proven that the digital realm might perhaps provide the most tangible solutions to the kinds of issues every form of political art tries to address. Cornellia Sollfrank’s Cyberfeminist project, Female Extension is extremely relevant in this context even today, considering that corporations as expansive as Amazon have only just revealed that their cyber-bots have developed algorithms that have automatically been censoring out job-applicant profiles that contain the image of a woman or the words “woman, women, girl, female” etc. in them.
Essentially, I acknowledge that the activist connotation of digital art is what draws me towards it. While something like Jodi.org is inventive in its own purpose, using digital media for the sake of using digital media is not a sub-field I am as interested in exploring, as the hacktivism aspects of digital productions that can reach a much larger audience than any other art movement could achieve in the past, in a much shorter duration of time. I am extremely amused by the real-time mockery of what goes on around the internet in pieces like Bindigirl (almost so as to say; “Hey, did you see those pop-up advertisements of Indian pornsites with the tagline ‘hot-young-brown-exotic-ethnic-girl-on-webcam’ when you were trying to open Wikipedia yesterday? Now see this.”) and by political commentaries that are direct and pervasive to the point of being satirical, such as the one on black slavery that Keith Obadike highlights by quite literally putting his African-American racial identity up for an ebay auction captioned ‘Blackness for Sale’.