ABSTRACT
When the first commercial browser was released by Netscape in 1994, it immediately became clear that the Internet was no longer merely an exchange platform geared towards the needs of scientists and software engineers, but that it had evolved into a genuinely popular medium (Tribe and Jana, 2006: 6). The development of the graphical user interface (GUI) that now marked the intersection between man and machine was especially important in convincing even the last remaining sceptic that the computer was not just a simple calculator, but rather a complex medium of communication and for the remediation of, among other things, newspapers, film, and radio (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). It was in this context that terms such as “new media” and “media art” first appeared and were retrospectively applied to just about every new movement that had emerged in the arts since the 1960s (Daniels, 2011: 61-62). At the same time, exploring the computer’s potential as a medium helped further the idea that every kind of art had always been media art, inasmuch as the term “media” can also refer to all sorts of tools, appliances, machines, artificial extensions of the body etc. However, the precise nature of these concepts as well as the differences between them are hardly clear cut. It is nevertheless possible to define “new media art” as a general term for every kind of art that is created with the help of a computer. Furthermore, there are several synonyms and subdivisions: Occasionally, one hears terms such as “multimedia art,” “digital art,” “computer art,” or “interactive art”; then there is also “net art,” which is found on the Internet and can be accessed from any personal computer; and finally there is “installation art” that is characterized by its specific location and concrete materiality.
