Release party for New Media Art: Art in the Age of Digital Communication by Reena Jana and Mark Tribe

Part of the Celebrating New Media Scholarship series

The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Rhizome will present a reception for Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's recently released book New Media Art: Art in the Age of Digital Communication. The reception will be held at the New Museum bookstore on the evening of June 2nd. Cocktails will be served and the authors will give a brief reading.

Artists have always been early adopters of emerging media technologies, from Albrecht Dürer and his use of the printing press in the 16th century to Nam June Paik's experiments with video in the 1960s. In 1994, the advent of the Internet as a popular medium catalyzed a global art movement that began to explore the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of such new communication technologies as the Web, video surveillance cameras, wireless phones, hand-held computers, and GPS devices.

This seminal book addresses New Media art as a specific art historical movement, focusing not only on technologies and forms but also on thematic content and conceptual strategies. New Media art often involves appropriation, collaboration, and the free sharing of ideas and expressions, and frequently addresses the political ramifications of technology around issues of identity, commercialization, privacy, and the public domain. Many New Media artists are profoundly aware of their art historical antecedents, making reference to Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual art, Performance art, and Fluxus.

Artists featured include: Cory Arcangel, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Vuk Cosic, Mary Flanagan, Ken Goldberg, Paul Kaiser and Shelly Eshkar, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Mouchette, MTAA, Keith and Mendi Obadiki, Radical Software Group, Raqs Media Collective, RTMark, and John F. Simon Jr.

The authors: Mark Tribe is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He founded Rhizome.org, an online resource for the New Media art community. His art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media and the Ars Electronica Festival, and he has curated exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and MASS MoCA.

Reena Jana is a New York-based critic and editor. She has written on contemporary art and digital culture for a variety of publications, including Artforum, Art and Auction, Art in America, ARTnews, Bookforum, Flash Art, frieze, The New York Times, and Wired