ABSTRACT

How in detail do these discussions regarding the cultural contexts and politics of digital media relate to practice? In what follows we discuss three ways in which we think digital media practices engage with as well as contribute to our current understanding of wider contemporary cultures. First, we discuss digital media as an extension of existing media forms and institutions in which we account for digital media as the result of the application of digital technologies to existing media practices. Here digital media is, as might be expected, thought of as a continuous extension of, rather than a radical break with, the current landscape of media culture. Second, we discuss digital media as it has been taken up and framed by the institutions of contemporary artistic cultures as a medium. This we assert, has become largely a matter of the way in which digital media is argued as the latest extension of the European modernist avant-garde in which the formal properties of a medium are prioritised over its conventional uses. Third, and much more speculatively, we discuss some of the ways in which digital media, now in its widest sense as the world of information and data, has been seen as challenging fundamental notions of thought and human nature. We have defined these three areas of discussion as follows and will look at each one in turn:

Digital media as a continuous extension of existing media culture in which the rules of representation are maintained.

Digital media as an avant-garde looking towards art institutions in which the rules of representation are playfully broken.

Digital media thought of as provoking a crisis in culture in which the rules of representation are abandoned in favour of the logic of the system.