Summary of content
Major changes in art have always been accompanied by changes in media. New media art developed based on high-tech media is the current computer, A new art style developed by mixing and integrating advanced scientific and technological achievements such as video, network, and digital imaging technology. However, in sharp contrast to the booming development trend of new media art, there are very few studies on new media art theory. Through the clarification of new media art, especially the intensive exploration of its language character characteristics, this article seeks to find the unique "vocabulary model" and "grammatical norms" of new media art, and based on the fulcrum of the language paradigm of new media art itself, We will compare it with traditional painting styles and conduct detailed screening to explore the unique way of perception and aesthetic qualifications of new media art, as well as the role of this way of perception and aesthetic qualifications in promoting the development of image culture.
Keywords visual culture/new media art/image culture/activation
If we only look at the natural evolution of the entire art material, new media art with high technology as the fulcrum The emergence of art is not a major event, it is just a step and stage among many aspects of the development of artistic expression media. However, just as oil paints have had a huge impact and promotion on Western art, it is still unknown whether this new medium can play a decisive role in the development of art in the future. Even so, in the half century of the rise and development of new media art, we can still feel the aggressiveness of this new art style. In a certain sense, high-tech media art represented by computers in the information society is gradually becoming a common art style in this society. People cannot leave digital images just as they cannot leave computers.
1. The language character of new media art
Since its birth, new media art has been ambiguous and ambiguous due to the diversity of media. Does new media art exclude all art styles other than traditional media represented by oil paints and sculpture materials in traditional art, or does it refer to something else and cover it? This is the need to examine the language characteristics of new media art. premise. From a literal point of view, New Media Art is a term opposite to Media Art. If Media Art refers to artists’ use of all industrial and commercial methods other than traditional painting and sculpture in industrial society, and technical materials", (Note: Zhang Zhaohui's "What is New Media Art?", "Art Observation", Issue 10, 2001, page 66.) Then "new media art" mainly refers to Those artistic works that use the latest scientific and technological achievements such as video, computers, networks, and digital technologies as creative media." (Note: Wang Duanting, "
The first distinctive language quality is its reliance on high technology. From Fluxus art, avant-garde film, video art to digital art and Internet art, the development of new media art all demonstrates its close relationship with high technology. Fluxus art originally originated in the field of avant-garde music. It integrated physical noise and religious concepts. Driven by the "intermedia" creative concept of the American young Dick Higgins, Fluxus art Qualitative changes have taken place, integrating performance stage, film, camera and other imaging media, not only forming a spectacular artistic trend, but also creating a large number of special artistic effects based on the different operations of each medium itself. Subsequently, the gradual popularization of televisions and cameras began to get rid of the creative limitations caused by the expensive cost of film, and extensive use of video and video technology led to the rise of another media revolution in art, forming the display of television and other media. Tools for video art.
This new art style horizontally absorbs the expression methods of installation art and performance art, and adds new media materials such as the body and television to form video installation art; vertically, it focuses on the exploration of the subjectivity of the creative subject. , in the process of displaying subjectivity, it expanded into two types of video art: conceptual and self-identity. With the in-depth development of the information society and the popularization of computer technology, it soon evolved into digital art and network art, thereby creating a new type of virtual aesthetic experience for human beings.
It is not enough to look at new media art only in terms of material. In terms of form, it also appears as the borrowing and collage of existing image resources, and through this special artistic creation method, it forms a Mixed text forms. "Collage, like parody, is the imitation of a special or unique style, wearing a stylistic mask and speaking a dead language; but it is a neutral form of imitation, without the hidden motive of parody , without the impulse of irony…Collage is empty parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour: collage is a parody of the eccentric, a modern practice of empty irony.” (Note: [U.S.] Frederic Jameson's "Cultural Turn", translated by Hu Yamin and others, China Social Sciences Press, October 2000, first edition, page 5.) As an artistic method, collage He transfer and borrowing is an original move that postmodern artists talk about, which uses "metaphor, imitation, substitution, and borrowing" between texts (Note: Gao Minglu, "Chinese Avant-Garde Art", Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 1997 July 1st edition, page 183) directly cuts down the existing value center and forms an intertextual relationship with the existing text, "making full use of mass media, photos, newspapers, magazine collages, and video posters" (note : Gao Minglu's "Chinese Avant-Garde Art", Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 1st edition, July 1997, page 183) and other image resources, putting aside the drawing style of the diagram, integrating the original images to form. The contrasting tension between the expressive power of the text itself and the intertextuality. Of course, this kind of transfer and collage is not purposeless, but a morphological integration that governs the artist's artistic concept. "Blair Witch", known as a representative work of rebellious text (many film theorists regard it as a model text of American "independent film", but we prefer to regard it as a representative of new media art) in the shooting method It has established a new concept of artistic writing for new media art in many aspects, such as narrative organization and so on, completely erasing people's existing new media art concepts and achieving an innovation in the way of understanding text. In the entire image narrative, there is a mixture of television cameras (special), home cameras, old-fashioned 16mm movie cameras and other writing tools. Through the adoption and concatenation of the news report-style mirror language system, an image style is formed. Different combinations cause the images displayed on the screen to jump, connecting the most backward and most advanced imaging tools currently available to mankind. In addition, all the image passages in the text are randomly shot, collaged and assembled outdoors. This effect directly changes the image texture in the traditional text, overflowing with the looseness and folk characteristics of new media art forms. It reveals the diversity and richness of image forms and combines the pioneering form characteristics of new media art. Therefore, "To make a work of art a work of art, it must transcend grammar and syntax." (Note: [U.S.] Arthur Danto, "The End of Art", translated by Ouyang Ying, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, September 2001, No. 1 Edition, page 62.) Bart Newman made full and necessary affirmation for the continuous transcendence and sublimation of the grammatical paradigm of new media art to complete the repair and addition of the form of art itself, which "transcends poetry, novels, etc." The limitations of previous art forms. In many fields, artists began to mix various media and incorporate kitsch and popular culture into their aesthetic creations." (Note: [US] "Postmodern Theory: Critical Questioning" by Douglas Kellner and Steven Best, translated by Zhang Zhibin, Central Compilation and Translation Press, January 1999 edition, page 13.)
The language quality of new media art is also reflected in the spectacle nature of images and graphic styles. Spectacle presentation is a "composite, imagined and enlarged image scene... It is the world that truly belongs to the movie. It There is no substitute for the dazzling audio-visual value." (Note: Yu Ji's "The Spectacle Nature of Movies - Theoretical Enlightenment from Méliès to American Science Fiction Films", "Contemporary Film", Issue 5, 1998, page 11.) "Integration It contains video wonders with various contents such as space, religious classics, historical mysteries, extraterrestrial legends, fairy tale interpretations, archaeological discoveries, etc." (Note: Yu Ji, "The Spectral Nature of Film - Theoretical Enlightenment from Méliès to American Science Fiction Films", "Contemporary Film", Issue 5, 1998, page 11.) Of course, not all new media art has this It has a grand narrative function, but drawing nutrition from movies is a common symptom of many new media arts. Although the early Fluxus art used very simple or even non-image films to play with people's aesthetic experience, with the continuous development of new media art, many works of art began to use sound, light, color, human body and other media to reconstruct artistic creation. , to express the anxiety and uneasiness that already exists in human beings today.
"Electronic Highway: Bill Clinton Stole My Idea" completed by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik in 1993 used 313 televisions to line up a wall, fully utilizing the flickering Neon lights and pipelines display "a database of contemporary life graphics, from politicians to street scenes, assembly lines, fashion shows, celebrity shows, traffic jams, environmental pollution and even mushroom clouds during atomic bomb explosions...weaving various fragments of television media culture in an orderly manner Together, it seems that the author is not describing the social reality of media overflow, but the crisis of survival and social disaster." (Note: Zhang Zhaohui, "Western Contemporary New Media Art (3)", "Jiangsu Pictorial", Issue 8, 2001 , page 4.) The spectacle of new media art has now been clearly revealed. The work "Water Fire Breath" completed in 1996 by another new media artist Bill Viola consists of three sets of projection equipment. All scenes are set on the ceiling of Denham Cathedral in the UK. Under the formal tension of Gothic art, they show the collision between a man and three basic elements of survival, in order to strengthen the contrast between man as a representative of strength and the indistinguishable one. The natural relationship between natural elements, one group shows a man in flames, while the other shows the man submerged in water. The three sets of visual art texts show the spectacle of men in water, fire and desire for survival by intensifying movements, and fully mobilize new artistic elements such as body and sound to create strong artistic appeal and shock.
Compared with mature video art, the artistic language characteristics of new media art are also expressed in vivid originality. From Fluxus art, avant-garde film to video art, new media art appears as a rebellion against existing image art. They use avant-garde films to resist film art, and use undifferentiated and primitive video materials to resist the news on TV. Reports, etc., all of which permeate the trend of artistic creation returning to its original form. For example, in "Blair Witch", the text gives people an obvious feeling that in addition to borrowing and collage, it also betrays and abandons the traditional narrative method. In the process of telling the story, the artist only highlights one main line, focusing on the search for the event itself. The search process itself is a very life-like image record, which inevitably creates a kind of image gap in the narrative sense. These gaps can only be filled and updated by borrowing narrative details created by various image writing tools, thus causing a departure from traditional image narratives and completing the fission and breakthrough of the text in narrative organization, image creation, and imaging basis. During the Fluxus art movement, new media artist Andy Warhol rebelled against Hollywood with practical actions. His works "Sleep" (1963) and "Kiss" (1963) eliminated the details of real life. The gap with film processing allows the camera to indiscriminately record the development of events that may not have story potential at all. The result of this rebellion against institutionalized Hollywood is the originality and freshness of the image form itself.
In addition, although the origins of digital art and Internet art can also be traced back to the 1960s, the representative art styles that are the emerging trend of new media art are products of the 1990s. At first glance, There are huge differences between it and other new media art, but the four qualities of new media art’s dependence on high-tech technology, transfer and collage, nature of spectacle, originality and freshness still have strong coverage and tolerance. . In the visual character of digital art, the characteristics of fantasy, rules, virtuality and compounding (Note: For the visual character of digital art, see Lin Tao's "Digital Art", Chongqing Publishing House, first edition, August 2002, pp. 2-9 page.) can find corresponding positions in the language character of new media art, especially in online games and online animations, this character is particularly prominent and has even become a typical feature of the language character of new media art.
As we all know, the emergence of theory is the sublimation of experience. Although the development of new media art itself is not sufficient and it is impossible to make an accurate and comprehensive summary, after more than half a century of development and exploration , the basic language character of new media art is still very clearly highlighted.
2. The impact of new media art on traditional art
As a new art form that has just emerged for nearly half a century, new media art continues the legacy of performance art, installation art, and conceptual art. The character of art, music and film art gradually formed its own unique artistic qualifications. Although it has absorbed the constituent elements of various arts in terms of origin, it has also caused a huge rift between its reliance on new media and the art styles it absorbed (more focused on modern art). There is a profound gap between new media art and traditional art, and this gap corresponds to the post-modern social context, showing an obvious sense of rebellion and division.
The first impact of new media art on traditional art is to break the myth of "elite art" and eliminate the sense of distance between "elite art" and mass art. Traditional art has always been a "tool" played by noble elites. However, under the premise that human culture has shown a diversified trend at the end of the century, postmodernism at the forefront of culture is actually a human being once again establishing a way to replace classics with civilian discourse. A cultural movement of discourse.
This cultural movement with a revolutionary nature conceptually provides the possibility of breaking the order established by the old authority. It is the beginning of the "marginalization" of image culture, and all human cultural achievements have evolved into fragments in the postmodern cultural concept. These resources provide the resource allocation and narrative expression of original discourse for the transfer of image culture, and constitute the attitude towards the existing image culture achievements, that is, new media art writing. So, what kind of character should the writing method we call "new media art" have? Is it just the vivid originality of the text itself? Of course, this is also one of its symptoms, but this kind of The widespread existence of new cultural writing methods in a folk way is an important reminder. As a prerequisite for the natural expression and expression of individual words, it can truly listen to the inner voice of human beings, so it at least means the acquisition of pure subjectivity. Professional images are masked image writings, which are some control powers given to elites by the historical context of images. Most of the time, they reveal the metaphorical characteristics of a discourse expression. Therefore, whether it is the hegemony of mainstream discourse or the "elite" The imposition of "art" is an image landscape filtered by various ideologies, and it is a manifestation of the gradually weakening subject gaining powerful power. This kind of new media art is fundamentally different from professional images. This difference is reflected in the freedom and flexibility of expression in new media art, which is unmatched by any professional image. It can transcend the constraints and constraints of ideology and truly realize the subject. The free emergence of sexual existence has become a symbol of the improvement and progress of human beings' own inherent way of existence. Therefore, “first focusing on concepts, and then combining other aspects of performance art, body art, sound art and Fluxus art, multimedia installation art grew up, reflecting a variety of things and ideas in the art field, and challenging the previous The Development of Television Advertising-Based Media Systems”. (Note: Qin Heng's "Visual Installation Art", "World Art", Issue 2, 2001, compiled in [English] Michael Rush: "New Media in Art in the Late 20th Century", published by Thames & Hudson , London, 1999.) Although we cannot accurately predict the trend of new media art, the empirical evidence of new media art at least reflects a benign beginning of the new century and clearly shows one direction of the development of new media art.
In the form combination of traditional art, "the elements that constitute form mainly include media, line, surface, light and shade, texture, space and color", (Note: Otto G. Ocvirk, Robert Bone, Robert Stinson , Philip Wigg: "Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice", WM.C.Brown Company Publisher, 1962, P 11.) Limited by the limitations of the material, its main function is to complete objects in two-dimensional and three-dimensional (sculpture) space shape and display. In new media art, the modeling and display capabilities have been greatly expanded and enriched. It not only inherits the traditional art’s desire to occupy space, but also absorbs the two components of motion and sound in video art, which means that in terms of expressiveness It adds two new aesthetic dimensions: auditory perception and time flow. “The concept of using video as a purely visual medium seems wrong to me. The simple reason is that video occurs in time. Visual artists, trained to work with space, often have a very uncertain grasp of time and the importance of time-based arts such as theatre… Visual art demands such centralization: we are expected to be enthusiastic about painting and sculpture , but it also requires us to dedicate our time to it.” (Note: [US] Tomkins "Seeing and Not Seeing", quoted from [UK] Edward Lucey-Smith: "New Dada, Conceptual Art and Installation", Spanish-American translation, "World Art", 1998 Year, Issue 3, Page 6.) Obviously, the morphological composition of new media art itself has surpassed traditional art and undergone qualitative changes, completely expanding and subverting the expression forms of traditional art, and new artistic expression methods fully meet the needs of the future. The cultural intention and social context of pursuing visual pleasure in modern art.
The impact and changes of new media art on traditional art are also reflected in the exploration of artistic modernity through multiple channels. New media art breaks out of the barriers of traditional art that focuses on the form itself, adapts to the new cultural context and focuses on things other than art form. Traditional art, especially "from the mid-16th century to the mid-19th century, Western aesthetic intention is to establish some formal artistic principles around the rational organization of space and time. The aesthetic ideal of harmony and consistency serves as an adjustment principle. "It works, its focus is on the unity of the relevant whole and form" (Note: [US] Daniel Bell, "Contradictions of Capitalist Culture", translated by Zhao Yifan, Pu Long, and Ren Xiaojin, published by Sanlian Bookstore, 1989 May 1st edition, page 157.) Western classical art has always adhered to the concept of space since Euclid and the imitation theory defined by the ancient Greek ancestors. However, after the impact of irrational trends of thought, the strictly rational concept of space has changed. disappeared, and modern art with various schools began to strongly highlight and exaggerate single elements in morphological composition.
After the 1960s, under the attack of new cultural sentiments, following abstract art, "the canvas began to look like a place for action for one American painter after another - rather than a place that relied on reproduction, redesign, and analysis." and 'representing' a space of real and imagined objects" (Note: [American] Rosenberg, quoted from Daniel Bell's "Contradictions of Capitalist Culture", translated by Zhao Yifan, Pu Long, and Ren Xiaojin, published by Sanlian Bookstore, 1989 May 1st edition, page 173). Therefore, as a new media art that emerged in the late 1950s, it takes pleasure in promoting this rebellious sentiment and directly uses its own practical actions to deconstruct traditional art in order to achieve its goal. The pursuit of artistic modernization. Of course, it cannot help but reveal the weakness of obliterating the boundaries between art and life, and focusing on things other than the ontology of art, making art essentially "a special way for truth to enter existence, that is, to become historical truth" and "a nation's An origin of historical Dasein", (Note: [Germany] Heidegger's "Man - Dwelling Poetically", translated by Gao Yuanbao, published by Guangxi Normal University Press, 1st edition, October 2000, page 93.) It completely subverts "focusing on people and using human experience as a person's understanding of himself, God, and nature" (Note: [English] Alan Block, "Tradition of Western Humanism", translated by Dong Leshan, Sanlian Bookstore Published, 1st edition, October 1997, page 12. Therefore, due to its focus on the "conceptual" world outside the text and its disdain for loose forms, new media art has not only become the mainstream mode of current art, but also explored and practiced the modernity of art, forming a variety of The existence of art with mixed patterns.
3. New media art’s contribution to current image culture
As mentioned above, the hypertextual significance of the emergence of new media art is far greater than the development of the text itself. This meaning is that the uniqueness of its own text character enables it to establish a new concept of artistic writing for people in many aspects, thereby clarifying people's existing concepts of image culture and visual culture, and innovating the cognitive approach to text.
New media art first strengthens and highlights the subjectivity of human beings. Especially with the promotion of technology, image culture has gradually been introduced to the public class, tearing apart the confinement that was only played by the image elite. The noble veil promotes the transformation of image culture and visual culture, and this transformation of image culture directly signals the spread of new media art's right to narrative discourse. With the expansion of the imaging field and its intervention in human life, the production methods of images have become conventional means that ordinary people and all social institutions can control. There has been a massive increase in the number of home video recorders, home cameras, editing and broadcasting systems, and various digital images. The extensive development and simplified development of software have provided direct possibilities for ordinary people to obtain the right to narrate images. The acquisition of the right to speak and the multi-channel display of the image system, especially the diversity of broadcast channels such as home live broadcast, internal live broadcast in the unit, microwave transmission, cable transmission, satellite transmission, Internet broadcast, etc., provide a supporting platform for personal image narration, forming a It has a complete image cycle process of shooting, editing and broadcasting, and can even be given an economical operation and sales channel, which simultaneously ensures a virtuous cycle of personal image narration in all aspects.
In addition, new media art has enhanced the interaction between image culture and human artistic experience. Visual culture is no longer a narrow entity at the level of human civilization as a whole, but an ever-expanding cultural aspect, especially in the current network-centered era, which has formed a large number of art, television, film, Internet, etc. In the age of images composed of images, and catalyzed by the rising professional and non-professional art education activities around the world, visual culture has become related to human beings’ own life and leisure, and has become a way of dependence on human beings’ own survival, especially in recent times. This is more truly reflected in the emergence of the younger generation, which the Chinese call the new humanity. They have been immersed in video culture since childhood. Animation and cartoons have become their own self-sufficient spiritual "paradise" in their childhood. This viewing habit formed since childhood has imprinted the imprint of the graphic way of life. Obviously, image culture no longer exists in the writings of academic theorists. It has long been wedged into and become a way of life for people. Perhaps this is the real essence of the difference between the new and new humans, and it has become the link between the development of images and human survival. Interactive illustration. New media art also demonstrates another important dimension of image culture - the game function. It combines the experience function of movie watching with the broadcast function of new media art, especially Internet art, allowing the website to interact with the text and prompting visitors to generate A new aesthetic experience of "integration, agency, transformation", that is, "integration" into "the experience of immersion in the world of text", "agency" slowly evolves into "our ability to participate in the text", and "transformation" becomes "the experience given to us by electronic texts" The ability to shift sides, change identities, assume a role, or become a shapeshifter in a world that is always changing.” (Note: [US] J.P. Trotter, "The Planning of The Blair Witch Project", "World Cinema", Issue 2, 2002, page 146.
) Therefore, this kind of image text and new media art simultaneously provide digital magic when watching movies or gaming experiences, making this kind of relationship become an important way that cannot be ignored in the new century movie marketing strategy, forcing people to We have to consider the existence situation and marketing effect of this almost intertextual relationship formed by the transmission of new media art texts.
Another promotion of image culture by new media art is reflected in the formation of a kind of artistic writing. Writing is essentially a reflection of thinking patterns. In a society dominated by written civilization, language is a tool for thinking. In a cultural form dominated by images, schema perception and schema transformation should become the carrier of this kind of writing. Of course, writing and reading are inseparable. Since there is writing of images, reading of images naturally becomes an important part of written thinking. New media art that relies on high-tech media, especially after high-tech media gradually becomes popular among the people, the subject's desire to write is overflowing very strongly, and even this schema thinking mode will affect people's view of the world and form the use of Schemas are used to construct, reflect and replace the real picture of the world, slowly evolving and constructing a new way of seeing. Schematic symbols began to construct the real world, so "the boundary between image or analogy and reality has imploded, and with this, people's previous experience of 'reality' and the basis of reality have also disappeared."
(Note: [US] "Postmodern Theory: Critical Questioning" by Douglas Kellner and Steven Best, translated by Zhang Zhibin, Central Compilation and Translation Press, January 1999 edition , page 154.