Digital Media and Contemporary Art

Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?

Diffractive Art Practices: Computation and the Messy Entanglements between Mainstream Contemporary Art, and New Media Art

We engage with Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction (2007) to re-evaluate the relations between mainstream contemporary art (MCA) and new media art (NMA)1 that have been discussed for many years as part of a somewhat contentious debate. Our diffractive reading highlights both large and small but consequential differences between these art practices. We do not smooth over the tensions highlighted...

Digital Islamic Art: The use of digital technologies in contemporary Islamic art in the UK

In this paper, I provide a brief introduction to my artistic practice combining the use of digital technologies with traditional methods for producing Islamic art. Looking at further examples of Islamic artworks by artists in the UK I describe how in some cases, the artworks are digital in themselves, using digital technologies as a medium and in other cases, the digital plays a part in the cre...

Storytelling: From Cave Art to Digital Media

O nce upon a time, about 6,000 years ago, early tribesmen drove a herd of gazelles into a dead-end canyon in Syria and slaughtered them. All that remained for modern anthropologists were bones from the animals’ lower limbs.1 A copious amount of meat must have been harvested and rapidly consumed—perhaps as part of a religious ceremony with numerous participants—given that era’s lack of refrigera...

The Media Art Notation System: Documenting and Preserving Digital / Media Art

This paper proposes a new approach to conceptualizing digital and media art forms. This theoretical approach will be explored through issues raised in the process of creating a formal declarative model (alternately known as a metadata framework, notation system, or ontology) for digital and media art. The approach presented and explored here is intended to inform a better understanding of media...