Medium Art

Abstract

There is a strange term: media art—a term that simply places the word media, which runs through all of art, directly on top of art itself. This name, which arose derivatively as the word “media,” came, in its social usage, to denote only a subset of media—such as new media, digital media, and mass media—nonetheless carries the potential to introduce an alternative perspective and impulse into the formation of art–medium relations. This paper, provoked by the compound word “media art,” presents an art that contains a new relationship between medium and art—namely, an art in which the medium itself becomes the body of the artwork and the object of aesthetic judgment. Drawing from McLuhan’s text, the paper begins by describing another level of communication in which the medium itself becomes its message (the sent). Based on this, it identifies the condition in which the medium itself becomes the object of aesthetic judgment. Building on this foundation, the paper defines media art as the art of producing beautiful media, and discusses the characteristics that emerge from this definition, along with its relationship to existing inductive definitions of media art. Specifically, a media artwork is understood as a new medium in itself—one that remains open to content—and the art entails an aesthetic resistance to contemporary society and to the genealogy of both media and art. Finally, the paper highlights the conscious and radical practice of this form of media art, referring to it as “media-artism.”

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