Martin Rieser Artist and Writer New Screen Media

2002 co- edited: New Screen Media: Cinema/ Art/Narrative (BFI/ZKM, 2002) with Andrea Zapp- which combines a DVD of current research and practice in this area together with critical essays .

 

This unique volume is presented with an accompanying DVD-ROM, featuring extracts from some of the groundbreaking works discussed by leading media theorists from Europe and the USA, including: Annika Blunck, Alex Butterworth, Sean Cubitt, Söke Dinkla, Jon Dovey, Timothy Druckrey, Malcolm Le Grice, Lev Manovich, Peter Weibel, Paul Willemen and John Wyver.

 

The advent of new media presents a serious challenge to our understanding of visual representation, of narrative and indeed the whole art of the moving image. New narrative forms in hypertext, multimedia, computer games, interactive broadcast and screen media are constantly redefining the relationship between the creators of content and their audiences, who increasingly are becoming the co-producers of meaning.

This publication juxtaposes the work of leading cultural theorists and philosophers of new media, against creative artists' attempts to accommodate to these vehicles of content. The book shows how classical narrative in many areas has been giving way to a new, more fragmentary culture of drama. It re-purposes the use of critical tools for discussing the inner design and immersive effects of the new media forms and its social, political and cultural contexts. Alongside a discussion of how these new stories relate to issues of identity and the body, restructured temporal and spatial models and interfaces, the book explores differing creative platforms such as the Internet, Media Installation, Interactive Broadcast, CD-ROM and Expanded Cinema.
The artists, themselves exploring innovative solutions, critically examine their own practice, with a special focus on fiction-based forms of interaction.

 

"One of the great attributes of this volume, then, is its balance of historical precedent and contemporary innovation. This creates a strong sense of the historical continuity of technological experimentation in the cinema, a continuity in which we must locate new media as a stage in its evolution, rather than a departure from it or a dramatic, unforeseen incursion into it...

 

...As this fine collection evidences, there is such rich, yet indeterminate potential for fusion within screen based media that what-is-to-come in the name of hybridity is nothing new, but rather the fulfillment of unknowable potential implicit in the continuing history of the screen as a medium. When we encounter such work, there may be an uncanny air of familiarity about it, the vague sensation that we have seen it before, or been prepared for its arrival."

Darren Tofts

Swinburne University

 

"Strange, I've Seen That Interface Before"

Darren Tofts,Swinburne University, Australia.