new–noun1. something that is new; a new object, quality, condition, etc.: Ring out the old, ring in the new.

me⋅di⋅a–noun1. the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.

Lascaux, France 10,000 B.C.

Decree 426 B.C.

The road to recovery, McLuhan suggest, is to recognize that electronic media are subtly and constantly altering our perceptual senses. The serial logic of print is fading out before the intuitive “mosaic” of instantaneous communication. Books “contain,” TV “involves.” The new vision is mythic, tribal, decentralized. Man now lives in a global-sized village, and is returning to the values and perceptions of a preliterate culture.

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

The Medium is the MessageMarshall McLuhen 1911–1980

For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the "content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human factions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.

For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.

For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

The message of theatrical production is not the musical or the play being produced, but perhaps the change in tourism that the production may encourage.

So then keeping in mind the previous examples what change in scale (The Message) did New Media (The Medium) have on human affairs?

Wilhelm Richard Wagner 1813–1883

Gesamtkunstwerk:He transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, Total Artwork, the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, epitomized by his monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). To try to stage these works as he imagined them, Wagner built his own opera house, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

The Futurists declared cinema could be the most dynamic of human expressions because of its ability to synthesize all of the traditional arts, unleashing a form that was totally new.

The Futurist cinema would free words from the fixed pages of the book and "smash the boundaries of literature," while it would enable painting to "break out of the limits of the frame."

*The Futurist Cinema Manifesto 1916Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 1876–1944

Vannevar Bush 1890–1974

MEMEX:In 1945 the Atlantic Monthly invited Bush to contribute an article on this theme, and the result was the landmark essay, As We May Think. He used this high profile forum to propose a solution to what he considered the paramount challenge of the day: how information would be gathered, stored, and accessed in an increasingly information-saturated world. This article had a profound influence on the scientists and theorists responsible for the evolution of the personal computer and the Internet.

Norbert Wiener 1894–1964

Cybernetics:Norbert Wiener defined Cybernetics as the science of transmitting messages between man and machine, or from machine to machine. Wiener's remarkable insight, which is the premise behind all human-computer interactivity and interface design, is that human communication should be a model for human-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

Billy Klüver 1927–2004

In the late 1950s he became the chief catalyst for the art and technology movement that was launched dramatically in the spring of 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art, with Jean Tinguely's self-destructing kinetic sculpture, Homage to New York. Klüver's participation in this work, with its paint bombs, chemical stinks, noisemakers, and fragments of scrap metal, inspired a generation of artists to imagine the possibilities of technology, as the machine destroyed itself, in Klüver's words, "in one glorious act of mechanical suicide."

Jean Tinguely 1925–1991

Kinetic Art:

Dick Higgins 1938–1998

Intermedia:Higgins attention is focused on Intermedia, a myriad of emerging genres that spilled across the boundaries of traditional media. In the interseces between the arts, mixed-media forms coalesced: Happenings, performance art, kinetic sculpture, electronic theater, as well as a variety of deliberately uncategorizable works – such as his own Danger Music #2 from 1962.

Morton Heilig 1926–1997

Sensorama:He believed that by expanding cinema to involve not only sight and sound, but also taste, touch, and smell, the traditional fourth wall of film and theater would dissolve, transporting the audience into a habitable, virtual world. He called this cinema of the future experience theater, constructing an arcade-style machine in 1962 dubbed Sensorama, that catapulted viewers into multi-sensory excursions through the streets of Brooklyn, as well as other adventures in surrogate travel.

Ted Nelson 1937–

Hypertext:With Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Xanadu, a magic place of literary memory, in Nelson's words, that provided him with the image of a vast storehouse of memories, and which served as the inspiration for his life's work. From these influences, Nelson began his quest to build creative tools that would transform the way we read and write, and in 1963 he coined the words hypertext and hypermedia to describe the new paradigms that these tools would make possible.

Allan Kaprow 1927–2006

Happenings:Kaprow developed techniques to prompt a creative response from the audience, encouraging audience members to make their own connections between ideas and events. The Happening was a constellation of events that could be distributed across once arbitrary temporal and spatial boundaries.

The decentralization of authorship, location, and narrative – here united by the intent of the artist and the imagination of the participating audience members – foreshadows non-linear forms in digital media which makes use of interactive and networked technology to expand the boundaries of space and time.

Nam June Paik 1932–2006

Cybernated Art:In the 1960s, Nam June Paik embraced the medium of television, and became the founding father of video art. His long and prolific relationship with electronic media began notably with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, in controversial performance works such as Opera Sextronique from 1967. Paik's oeuvre later included television sculpture, satellite art, robotic devices, and giant video walls with synthesized imagery pulsating from stacks of cathode-ray tubes.

Douglas Engelbart 1925–

He is best known as the groundbreaking engineer who invented such mainstays of the personal computer as the mouse, windows, e-mail, and the word processor.

Engelbart led one of the most important projects funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the 1960s: a networked environment designed to support collaborative interaction between people using computers. It was dubbed the NLS (oNLine System).

Myron Krueger 1942–

Responsive:At the heart of Krueger's contribution to interactive computer art was the notion of the artist as a composer of intelligent, real-time computer-mediated spaces, or responsive environments, as he called them. Krueger composed environments, such as Videoplace from 1970, in which the computer responded to the gestures of the audience by interpreting, and even anticipating, their actions. Audience members could touch each other's video-generated silhouettes, as well as manipulate the odd, playful assortment of graphical objects and animated organisms that appeared on the screen, imbued with the presence of artificial life.

Alan Kay 1940–

Interface:Alan Kay led what is considered the most crucial advancement of human-computer interactivity, the graphical user interface (GUI). Kay introduced the idea of iconic, graphical representations of computing functions – the folders, menus, and overlapping windows found on the desktop – based on his research into the intuitive processes of learning and creativity.

Michael Naimark

Surrogate Travel:In 1979, he collaborated on the Aspen Movie Map, the navigable laserdisc tour through Aspen, Colorado dubbed by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte as one of the first examples of interactive multimedia.

The Aspen Movie Map was Naimark's first exploration into what he refers to as surrogate travel, in which the viewer is transported virtually to another place.

Lynn Hershman Leeson 1941–

Media artist Lynn Hershman divides her work into two categories: B.C. (Before Computers) and A.D. (After Digital). The line of demarcation occurred around 1980 as interactive technologies, including personal computers and laserdisc players, became commercially available. In her early performance works and site-specific installations (B.C.), Hershman had begun exploring themes that focused on issues of identity, alienation, and the blurring between reality and fiction.

Lynn Hershman Leeson 1941–

LORNA:1979–1983 A.D. The first interactive laser artdisk. LORNA tells the story of an agorophobic woman. Viewers have the option of directing her life into several possible plots and endings. Music by Terry Allen.

Bill Viola 1951–

Since he began producing video art in the early 1970s, Bill Viola has explored ways to manipulate and restructure our perception of time and space through electronic media. In such video installations as Room for St. John of the Cross (1983), Viola has demonstrated the narrative potential of dataspace, a territory of information in which all data exists in a continual present, outside the traditional definitions of time and space, available for use in endless juxtapositions.

Scott Fisher

Telepresence:This multi-sensory interaction with cybernetic devices created the powerful illusion of entering a digitized landscape. By pursing Morton Heilig's concept of experience theater, Fisher made a significant advance toward what he termed "telepresence" – the projection of the self into a virtual world.

Marc Canter

Critical Mass:He launched his software company, MacroMind (now Macromedia) in 1984, when the graphical user interface and its potential for hypermedia applications became widely available. His first product, SoundWorks, introduced multimedia production to the personal computer. In 1988 Canter released the now ubiquitous Director. By the close of the decade, desktop multimedia grew into a global phenomenon, with Canter at the center of the excitement, transforming the studios of artists, architects and designers, reinventing the classroom, and altering the business plans of executives from Silicon Valley to Singapore.

Tim Berners-Lee 1955–

World Wide Web:Working under his own initiative, in the fall of 1990 Berners-Lee completed the first Web browser and server software. In 1991, he began to distribute his software, now named the World Wide Web, to scientists over the Internet. Berners-Lee's Web is a software system that unites research, documents, programs, laboratories and scientists in a fluid, open, hypermedia environment.

Berners-Lee was well aware of his system's potential to link documents across the globe, and to transform our information culture. While his original focus was on hypertext, from the start he saw the Web's eventual embrace of multimedia, which could well prove to be its enduring legacy.

Marcos Novak 1957–

Liquid Architecture:Novak introduces the concept of liquid architecture, a fluid, imaginary landscape that only exists in the digital domain. Novak suggests a type of architecture cut loose from the expectations of logic, perspective, and the laws of gravity, one that does not conform to the rational constraints of Euclidean geometries. He views trans-architecture as an expression of the 4th dimension that incorporates time alongside space among its primary elements. Novak's liquid architecture bends, rotates, and mutates in interaction with the person who inhabits it. In liquid architecture, science and art, the worldly and the spiritual, the contingent and the permanent converge in a poetics of space.

Daniel Sandin 1942–

CAVE:Unlike other systems of virtual reality such as Scott Fisher's VIEW, the properties of the CAVE are enhanced by the interplay between the real and the virtual. The CAVE immersant does not experience disembodiment, but rather is viscerally aware of his or her physical presence on stage amidst the animated imagery and orchestrated sound.

Jenny Holzer 1950–

Since the late 1970s, Jenny Holzer´s work has sought to reformulate many of the givens of traditional art, especially in the context of public spaces. Holzer employs her texts singly or in combination in her permanent works, installations and xenon projections. Media employed in Holzer’s practice vary. Writing is programmed into electronic signs; printed on posters and t-shirts; carved in sandstone benches, marble floors and granite sarcophagi; cast as bronze plaques; or etched on silver. Further, her statements have appeared on billboards, movie marquees, automobiles, in news magazines, and on websites, as well as being projected onto facades, walls, water and mountainsides by laser or with xenon. Jenny Holzer makes use of the insistent appeal of modern advertising media for her own ideas.

iQVC Web Site 1995Clement Mok, Brian Forst & Studio Archetype

Discovery Channel Web Site 1994–1995Jessica Helfand

Discovery Channel Web Site 1994–1995: Jessica Helfand