Visual Culture and New Media

The Center for Visual Studies initiated a research project devoted to the relation between digital technology and culture, i.e. the new communication media (the Internet, mobile telephones, satellite and digital television, etc.), and the visual arts. The research will be conducted by experts in art history and history of literature, semioticians, sociologists and media theoreticians. In view of the Croatian tradition of media culture and media art, and taking into account the importance of new digital technologies in its present-day society, we believe that the time has come to undertake a sort of revalorization of the developments that took place in the new media scene over the past twenty years.

Ivan Picelj, CM-8-I, 1968. McGraw-Hill Collection, New York

The research aims to scrutinize the latest achievements of Croatian new media art and survey the state of the critical and theoretical reflection on it. The project will be open until 31 October 2008, and its results will be presented to the wider public at a symposium to be held at the end of November. The symposium will provide an opportunity to present the findings of all project participants. Interested researchers and scientists are welcome to contact the project manager, Klaudio Štefančić.

Research Platform

The emergence of the home computer, the invention of the World Wide Web service on the Internet and the ever accelerating process of the digitalization of culture marked the nineteen-nineties. To the change of the cultural paradigm – the transition from analog, machine culture to digital, computer culture – different fields of social activities responded in different ways, but what they all have in common is the awareness of the importance of McLuhan's concept of the "media", whether they are studying the new technologies' impact on culture, criticizing the new media-shaped view of the world or investigating the creative possibilities of new artistic "tools". In the process of introducing new digital communication technologies into social and natural sciences and art, the term "new media" was coined, meant on the one hand to stress the difference of new technological inventions (CD ROM, computer, Internet, wireless technology, mobile telephony, etc.) compared to the old media (telephone, telegraph, television, radio, etc.), and on the other hand to emphasize the big change which the use of new technologies has induced in society.

Apart from the entrepreneurial social stratum, academic and artistic strata also participated in the implementation of the new media. What is more, the awareness of the cultural aspects of every technology, including the new media, promoted in the works by theoreticians, artists and hackers, opened the door for critical and creative interpretations of communication technology. In other words, without the active participation of designers, theoreticians and artists in the shaping of the new media culture, the interfaces of our computers or mobile phones would be entirely different.

In Croatia, the artistic and theoretical reflection on the media, both "old" and "new", has a respectable tradition. It began with the international movement New Tendencies, whose numerous exhibitions, conferences and publications were dedicated to the role of technology in society and art. For example, the 1968 New Tendencies exhibition was dedicated to computers in art, and the impact of television upon society was the main topic of the international edition of the magazine Bit International (no. 8/9, 1972), containing contributions by eminent domestic and foreign experts (V. H. Pintarić, U. Eco, M. Meštrović and others) on different aspects of the medium of television. The culture of media art continued to develop in the seventies and eighties, primarily through the practices of video artists (D. Martinis, S. Iveković, B. Beban and others), but also through the marginalized activities of artists devoted to so-called computer graphics (V. Žiljak and others).