What Is New Media Art?

New media art is art that uses technologies developed in the last several decades as its material: code, video, networks, simulation and interaction. The term marks a distinction from painting and sculpture, where the medium has been stable for centuries, and it covers work that cannot exist without the equipment that runs it.

It is the category museums use to describe a large and growing part of their collections, and it carries a set of problems older media never had: what exactly is being acquired, how it is shown, and what happens when the platform it was made for disappears.

What is new media art?

New media art is art made with contemporary technology as its medium rather than its subject. The work depends on that technology to exist: turn off the machine and there is nothing left to look at.

That dependency is what separates it from a photograph of a computer or a painting about the internet. A digital print hanging on a wall is a fixed object that happened to be made digitally. A new media work is a system, a signal or a process, and it needs something running to be present at all.

The category is deliberately broad. It includes video art, generative and algorithmic work, interactive installation, net art, software art and sound work. What unites them is that the medium is a technology still in motion, which is why the boundaries of the term keep moving too.

How is new media art different from digital art?

Digital art is the wider term and describes anything made or shown with digital tools, including a painting made with a stylus. New media art is narrower and points at work where the technology is doing something the work could not do without it.

A digital illustration is digital art. It is a fixed image that could, in principle, have been painted. A piece that renders itself differently every minute, or responds to who is in the room, or exists only while a network is connected, is new media art, because no other medium produces that behaviour.

The distinction matters when it comes to collecting and conservation. A fixed image can be printed, stored and hung. A system has to be kept running, which raises questions a print never raises.

Where did new media art come from?

New media art has roots in the 1960s, when artists first gained access to computers, video equipment and broadcast technology at the same moment.

The Tate names Harold Cohen among the first practitioners of computer-driven art, working with computer-controlled robots to generate paintings in the late 1960s. Vera Molnar was making rule-based drawings in the same decade, alongside Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and Manfred Mohr. In parallel, the arrival of portable video equipment gave artists a time-based medium that did not require a film crew.

Those two lineages, the computational and the time-based, ran separately for decades and have largely converged. Most work described as new media art today involves both: something computed, unfolding over time.

What are the main kinds of new media art?

Five categories cover most of the field, and many works sit in more than one.

Video art uses recorded moving image as its material, played back in a gallery or on a screen. Generative art is produced by a system the artist designs, where the rules make the image and the output is never identical twice; what is generative art covers that discipline in detail.

Interactive art changes according to what a viewer does, using sensors, cameras or input devices. Net art exists on and about networks, and often cannot be moved off them. Software art treats the program itself as the work rather than as a tool for producing one.

Who are the important new media artists?

The field's most influential figures are frequently the ones who built its tools, which is unusual among art forms and says something about how young the medium is.

Casey Reas co-created Processing with Ben Fry in 2001, the open-source language that brought a generation of artists into computational work, and founded the Processing Foundation in 2012. A professor at UCLA since 2003, his work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, SFMOMA, the Centre Pompidou and the V&A. Zach Lieberman co-created openFrameworks, co-founded the School for Poetic Computation and leads the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab.

Karsten Schmidt has written open-source libraries used across the field and has exhibited at MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitney. Nicolas Sassoon works with early computer imaging, building images from pixel pattern and moire, and co-founded the collaborative projects SIGNALS and W-A-L-L-P-A-P-E-R-S. Hyojung Seo makes interactive work shown at SIGGRAPH and the Kobe Biennale. Ali Phi founded the Toronto collective NULLSIGHT and curates TADAEX, the Tehran Annual Digital Art Exhibition.

How do museums collect new media art?

Museums classify most of this work as time-based media, and they acquire it differently from a painting. What enters the collection is usually a combination of files, source code, documentation, installation instructions and sometimes the hardware itself.

The reason is that the work is a set of behaviours rather than an object. A conservator needs to know not only what the piece looks like but what it does, what it needs to run on, and what the artist considers acceptable if the original equipment fails. Institutions increasingly record that through artist interviews conducted at the point of acquisition.

This is the single largest practical difference between new media art and everything that came before it. A painting's conservation problem is physical decay over centuries. A new media work's conservation problem is that the platform it was written for can stop existing within a decade.

Why does new media art need specific hardware?

Because the display is not reproducing the work, it is where the work happens. The specification of that equipment is part of what the viewer sees rather than a technical footnote.

Black level decides whether a dark composition reads as depth or as grey haze, and a great deal of this work is dark. Colour gamut decides whether the palette the artist chose survives. Processing power decides whether a complex system runs at full resolution or quietly drops detail to hold its frame rate. Refresh behaviour decides whether slow movement looks continuous or stepped.

Format matters too. Much of this work is composed square, because the form carries none of the cinematic convention behind the 16:9 ratio. Shown on a widescreen panel it is either cropped or surrounded by bars, and neither is what the artist made.

Is new media art a good investment?

New media art has an established institutional market and a thinner secondary market than painting, which makes it a different proposition rather than a worse one.

The institutional side is settled. Museums have been acquiring this work for decades and the major collections hold it. At auction the record is shorter but real: in 2023 Sotheby's sold Vera Molnar's Themes and Variations, a series of 500 generative works made with Martin Grasser when she was 99, through the first Dutch auction in the house's 300-year history. It sold out in under an hour for 631 ETH, around 1.2 million dollars.

What moves value here is the same as anywhere: the artist's record, the significance of what they built, and whether the work can still be experienced as intended. The last of those is specific to the medium. A work that cannot be run is worth considerably less than one that can, which is why provenance in this field includes technical documentation.

What is time-based media?

Time-based media is the term museums use for art with duration: work that unfolds over time rather than existing as a static object. It covers film, video, slide, audio and computer-based work.

The term matters because it defines a conservation discipline. Institutions with time-based media collections employ specialists whose job is to keep this work playable, migrating formats, documenting behaviour and emulating obsolete platforms. Several major museums have dedicated time-based media conservation departments.

For a collector the practical takeaway is the list of questions those specialists ask. What exactly constitutes the work? What does it need to run on? What did the artist say is acceptable when the original equipment is gone? A seller who cannot answer those is selling a file rather than an artwork.

How is new media art displayed in a home?

The same way it is shown in an institution, at a smaller scale: on equipment chosen for the work rather than repurposed from television.

Galleries mount this work on dedicated screens or projectors, set the room's light for it and keep the machine running continuously. None of that is exotic. It translates directly to a domestic setting, and the parts that matter are the panel, the processing and the absence of anything competing for the surface.

What does not translate is a device built for another purpose. Anything with a tuner, an app store, a microphone or a camera is a television that also shows pictures, and its compromises land in exactly the places this work is most sensitive: black level, colour accuracy and the steadiness of slow movement.

Where can you see new media art?

Institutionally, most major museums now hold and show time-based media, including the Whitney, MoMA, SFMOMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dedicated festivals and biennales, among them SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica and the Kobe Biennale, show a great deal more of it than galleries do.

At home the obstacle is equipment. A television is engineered to decode and replay a video signal, which is the wrong job for work that has to be computed. Played back as a file, a running work becomes a loop, and the loop becomes visible. The Layer Canvas carries its own GPU and renders work in real time on a museum-grade square panel, with no tuner, no apps and no camera. Every artist named above is in Layer Curation; the full roster is on the Layer artists page.

What should you ask before buying new media art?

Five questions separate a durable acquisition from a file that stops opening, and none of them apply to a painting.

What exactly am I acquiring? The answer should be specific: the files, the source, the documentation, the installation instructions, and whether hardware is included. What does it need to run on, and is that equipment still made? Who holds the source code, and is it escrowed anywhere independent of the seller?

What did the artist say should happen when the original platform is gone? Migration and emulation both change a work slightly, and the artist's stated preference is the only thing that makes those decisions legitimate later. And finally, does the work render live or am I being sold a recording of it? For generative work in particular those are different objects at different prices.

A seller who can answer all five is selling an artwork. One who can answer none is selling a video file with a certificate attached.

Sources

Tate, Art Terms: Generative Art, tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/g/generative-art. Victoria and Albert Museum, Digital Art, vam.ac.uk/articles/digital-art. UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, faculty profile: Casey Reas, dma.ucla.edu/people/casey-reas. Artist details drawn from each artist's own site and institutional profiles, cited on their Layer artist pages.