new media?

Jack Burnham wrote, "conceptual art's ideal medium is telepathy."
I LOVE THIS! totally amazing and potentially totally true

i really like the angle from which this article approaches new media. we struggle to define ourselves in the time in which we live...and i think this author's attitude about looking at both the semantics and slippery territory of new media through the lens of history is a good approach.

i'd never heard the term opositional media before. i'm glad we've moved away from that term. funny how we always seem to put new categories and thing that we don't have good words for into a more negative space. time based and performative art were of course radical ideas in the 70s, and they also seem to me to be sensible reactions to the high modernism that folks like greenberg put in place. with all this essence of painting and flatness and purity and relegation of what media should do best, it's really little wonder that people either rejected this by doing with those media exactly what "they shouldn't" or that they should embrace new technology altogether.

i really like the discussion of video here and what it potentially was. this section reminds me of the things that people say about digital photography and even photography's early history when people were (and i suppose in some ways still are) trying to figure out if it had a place in art at all.

i also found the discussion about where the terms come from and where they might be heading to be really interesting. there are days that i think of myself as either a multimedia or potentially new media artist....and it's funny when these things just boil down to semantics or "place holders"....

"it is a place holder, but not because we lack better terms. Lunenfeld is not admitting the accuracy of "new media" to indicate a certain location between experimentation and art, where once oppositional and marginal practices lapse into organized, dominant ones. When better terms are devised by curators and specialists, the term new media may indeed be dropped; it might also reappear in reference to other unorganized, experimental practices just appearing on the art world's radar screen."....i think the idea that new media might exist between experimentation and art captures the whole attitude about new technology....we have to label it in order to talk about it....new things mean new words and a period of akwardness until we have them (if ever)...so it seems that this article is saying that what's new about new media is exactly what derrida suggests (ps he's my hero)....that we can't see it, can't label it...and so it's new only until we are able to put words to what we see. is it really artistic experimentation or just a further confounding of what we understand to be art at this moment?