What is New about New Media Art?

It is more than just computers...

My interactive piece Surface Tensions in Bogota, July 2023. Photo: The Work of Moments

I have been thinking a lot over the past years about new media art and how it fits into the broader tradition of visual art. Why is it important now? What previously inaccessible concepts, ideas or perspectives can be explored with it?

What is new about new media art?

This essay is my first attempt at getting a little bit closer to my answer.

---

The Intrinsic Perspective

I am not sure if Eric Hoel coined the term "intrinsic perspective," but it is where I heard it first, so he gets the credit here.

Coined by neuroscientist, philosopher and writer Eric Hoel in his phenomenal Substack of the same name, the intrinsic perspective is the view from inside the black box,^[1] the observer's view on the system they are immersed in. It is how it feels to be us, to us. More generally, it is how a system appears to an observer who is part of the same system.^[2]

As Hoel discusses in his recent book, The World Behind the World, science has for much of history been focused solely on the extrinsic: what the world is like "from the outside", how it can be measured, and what this measurement means for us humans. He argues this allowed science to progress rapidly by ignoring the pesky recursions that rear their heads when we start asking questions like "how can I know that I exist."^[3][4]

In contrast, literature embraces the idea of intrinsic perspective, using words to convey what it is like to be someone who is not you. Novels and poetry thus provide a framework through which intrinsic perspectives can be explored or described, but not experienced.^[5]

Traditional visual mediums like painting and sculpture are similarly constrained: they remain unable in most cases to show the "inside view" on a scene. Representational art has an inherently fixed point of view. Even the movements that began to play with perspective (mainly 19th-20th century movements such as Impressionism, Cubism or Surrealism, etc) are optically processed as snapshots of a scene, just a surreal scene. ^[6][7] Sculpture and much modern art does better, but is still received by the viewer as a static object in space, clearly separate from the viewer itself.

Art is an Intrinsic Perspective

This is not to say an intrinsic perspective on a work of art does not exist. Indeed, one must, for art requires an observer. An artwork is a textured, multi-faceted conceptual system comprised of ideas, emotions, and most importantly the consciousness of the artist. The view from inside this concept is the true art: Beautiful, obvious, inevitable.

Paul Thomas eloquently sums up this idea: "The observer, in trying to measure and contest the classical world, will only discover that their observations are always and necessarily inadequate. Each work of art is a theoretical supposition of the world that is observed, or as it looks like when brought into the pictorial plane."^[8]

Communicating the intrinsic perspective of a concept is the essence of art.

The Abstract Expressionists understood this well, and were the first movement to intentionally eschew representational form in lieu of abstract concepts and emotions. Barnett Newman once said "To [the abstract expressionist] a shape is a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable."^[9] This characterization describes an intrinsic perspective, here called an "abstract thought-complex," that Newman was attempting to convey via his painting.

Interestingly, he goes a step further and likens abstract expressionist painting to poetry, one of the art forms with the highest structural degree of intrinsic perspective. ^[10] He says that abstract art is "an attempt to change painting into a poetic language, to make pigment expressive rather than representational."^[11]

Newman understood the intrinsic, and was searching for ways to communicate. But the recipient determines the meaning of a message through the frame of reference of their own intrinsic perspective. ^[12] And this perspective, with its requisite variety across observers ^[13], is left implicit. The "I" who is viewing the artwork is not engaged with, the fourth wall remains unbroken.

This is the shortcoming of traditional visual media: The fact that each viewer has an unique intrinsic perspective is at best underused and at worst ignored. You can experience looking at the artwork, but you cannot experience the artwork.

The failure of art to make the observer self-reflect on their observation is a half measure. The observer is frequently ignored in everyday life, so this omission may seem trivial. However, it is for precisely this reason that stopping short of giving the emperor a mirror reinforces a dangerous, predominantly Western worldview that "I" am the center of universe. Its my world, the rest of you are just living in it.

Instead of subverting this status quo and challenging viewers with fresh meta-perspectives, traditional visual art has perpetuated the extrinsically-focused frameworks with which science parses the world and technology allows us to interact with it.

While it has allowed the human race to make dramatic progress over the last 2,000 years, this worldview is now imposing real limitations on further development. A fundamental change in perspective from extrinsic to intrinsic and relational is essential for humanity to be able to progress past failure modes in the current period of stagnation (there are quite a few concepts here that each deserve their own future essays, forgive my brevity here):

• Neuroscience has made no fundamental progress on a theory of consciousness for several decades ^[14]

• Extrinsic understanding of systems like natural ecosystems and the climate fooled humanity into thinking we controlled them, allowing exploitation and overuse, leading to today's critical state ^{[15] [16]}

• The popular idea that generative artificial-intelligence based models are controllable in any way once they reach a certain level of complexity ^{[17] [18]}

These risks are acute, impact all of humanity, and cannot be addressed using the frameworks and approaches of the past. Progress requires new ways of thinking about problems, systems, and humanity's relationship with each other and the natural world, not only for the scientists and engineers, but for people everywhere. A paradigm shift is necessary. If science is unwilling to bring it about and traditional artforms are unable, then a new medium of art is required.

---

New Media Art

New media art generally means art created with electronic or computerized technology. This is a broad category and includes generative art, video game design, robotics and 3D printing, interactive real time systems, AR/VR/XR, and more.^[19]

My practice (and this essay) focuses on experiential new media, or the subset of these disciplines focused on real-time participatory systems. Works in this paradigm can be large-scale interactive installations, small-scale "data sculptures," or distributed experiences with many concurrent users.

Experiential new media art starts with interactivity at its core, placing the viewer firmly on the "inside" of the art. Unlike traditional mediums, the observer (viewer) in this context has a causal relationship with the system (artwork) they are immersed in. That which causes exists.^[20] Interactivity allows and sometimes forces the observer to observe their act of observation, pulling the intrinsic perspective to the foreground of conscious thought.

The Medium Constrains the Message

I have written before that "The medium is interface, establishing a shared context between the artist and viewer within which a message may be transmitted." The message, or concept, I wrote, is the true art. At face value, this contrasts sharply with Marshall McLuhan's 1964 edict "the medium is the message" ^[21], arguing that

"The medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." ^[22]

However, these are really two sides of the same coin, for the message received cannot be separated from its medium of transmission. Language provides is the most obvious example: An idea must be said using through words, but who has not felt the inadequacy of language limit our ability to communicate with others? Language cannot be discussed without language. ^[23]

The messages with the most information are those that use the physical constraints of these transmission medium to their advantage to reinforce, underscore or decode parts of the message itself. Poetry leverages the constraints of language to comment on its inadequacy, "breaking the rules" of grammar and syntax to show that the rules are too limiting. Cubism used the fixed perspective of an observer to explore our conception of space.

Experiential new media integrates participant interaction to create a fundamentally new relationship between artist and viewer (now co-creator) demonstrating, not just depicting, the nature of being an observer. By thoughtfully exploring the conceptual space this new relationship opens up, perhaps experiential new media art can build the societal intuition needed at scale to navigate a self-referential world in the face of scientific and mathematical incompleteness.

This is the gift of new media: To allow us to look upon ourselves looking, and perhaps see each other anew.

---

References:

1. Ashby, W. R. (2015). An introduction to cybernetics. Martino Publishing. Page 86.

2. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 2.

3. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 44.

4. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 157.

5. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 33.

6. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pg 5.

7. Thomas, P., & Morton, T. (2018). Quantum Art and uncertainty. Intellect. Pg 34.

8. Thomas, P., & Morton, T. (2018). Quantum Art and uncertainty. Intellect. Pg 20.

9. Newman, B., O'Neill, J. P., & McNickle, M. (1992). Barnett Newman: Selected writings and interviews. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pg 108.

10. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 14.

11. Newman, B., O'Neill, J. P., & McNickle, M. (1992). Barnett Newman: Selected writings and interviews. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pg 88.

12. Foerster, Von Heinz, et al. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics. Fordham University Press, 2014. Pg 73

13. Ashby, W. R. (2015). An introduction to cybernetics. Martino Publishing. Page 207

14. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 63-68.

15. Hessler, Stefanie. Prospecting Ocean. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Published in Association Wtih MIT Press, Cambridge, 2019. Pg 44.

16. Jacobs, Jane. “Downtown Is for People (Fortune Classic, 1958).” Fortune, 18 Sept. 2011, fortune.com/2011/09/18/downtown-is-for-people-fortune-classic-1958/

17. Hoel, E. (2023, May 31). The White House agrees you have a small brain.

18. Hunt, Ben. “Ai R Us.” Epsilon Theory, 28 May 2023, www.epsilontheory.com/ai-r-us/.

19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media_art

20. Hoel, Erik. The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. Avid Reader Press, 2023. Pg 84.

21. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pg 1.

22. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pg 5.

23. Menand, L. (2023). The Free World: Art and thought in the Cold War. Fourth Estate UK/US. Pg 508.