Lev Manovich is a new media artist and theorist, and teaches at the University of California. In his book The Language of New Media, Manovich asks: What is new media? By examining new media in the context of avant-garde film and other recent visual and cultural history, Manovich develops insightful theories about how new media works and what makes it different. The book is a great introduction to new media art, and is very useful for anyone who uses computers creatively.

From Manovich’s self-interview about The Language of New Media:

Q. What is new media?

A: The short answer: read the book. More seriously, we can define new media as new cultural forms, which depend on computers for presentation and distribution: Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality, multimedia, computer games, computer animation. My book investigates continuities and discontinuities between these new forms and the old ones. What are the ways in which new media relies on older cultural languages and what are the ways in which it breaks with them? [...]

Manovich is especially interested in structures and forms which are unique to new media, such as the database and the interface. In this class, we’ll be working with some of these structures – our first assignment deals with loops, and for our second assignment we will look at the database as an aesthetic form.

Lev Manovich’s website is manovich.net. He has made the entire book available as a PDF: The Language of New Media.

Digital imaging refers to using computers to create and work with images. Early experiments with computer art in the 1960s often used plotters, which are printers which specifically print vector images. For some interesting examples, see Plotter Drawings on the Digital Art Museum website.

As computers continue to become more important in work, communication, and daily life, more and more artists find themselves working with digital technology. Think about how important computers have become to photographers and video artists over the past ten years. Even artists who do not create work directly on the computer use computers and the internet to research, communicate, and publicize their work. So learning to work with computers as part of your art practice is useful, even if you do not see yourself as a “digital artist”.

Digital imaging is used in many other fields besides artmaking. For example, digital imaging technology is very important for designers, photographers, cartographers, journalists, doctors, engineers, and many other professionals.

In this class, we will look at digital imaging as it is used for making art. You can think of digital imaging as part of a larger field of art called new media. Instead of traditional art media such as painting and sculpture, new media artists work with emerging technology to make art. Besides digital imaging, new media includes media such as video art and video installation, sound art, digital animation, interactive art and internet art, physical computing and electronics, art using computer code, biotechnology art, and even virtual art. Because it involves technology which is evolving quickly, the definition of new media is always changing. The Canada Council for the Arts defines new media as “Artworks that use multimedia, computers or communications technologies in creative expression”.

Digital imaging is an intuitive place to get started making art with computers, because you can use your drawing, painting, photography skills to create digital art. As the class progresses, we’ll look at other ways to make digital art, using the web, video and animation, and even working with computer code. Digital artists are doing a lot of interesting and exciting things. New media does not have the vast history of traditional media like painting or sculpture – it is really a whole new world.