UC Irvine

This paper explores the varying ways in which new media art currently interacts with the Internet, the network, and Web 2.0; it additionally touches upon the relationship between new media works and their often-tenuous situation within the institution by curators (e.g. in museums, galleries, etc.), as well as social media’s impact on sociality. A loose definition of new media (works using computers, code, digital video, and the Internet, among others), which is a term constantly in flux due to positioning and relevancy in relation to art and technology, is established in order to further explicate artworks that are primarily used to think through overarching related concepts.

My thesis exhibition Do You Want to Quit? Intimacy, Site, Self serves as a both a starting point for research and a larger case study in which to situate the following research; the artists’ works that were artworks included in the exhibition inspired correlations between materialism, community, and the archive as sites of inquiry in relation to new media art. I believe that interacting with new media art through touch exemplifies its importance for and with these three themes, and that both affect theory (as well as emotion in general) experiencing art firsthand are crucial in parsing through this work.