Lev Manovich

The appearance of New Media Reader is a milestone in the history a new field that, just a few years ago, was somewhat of a cultural underground. Before taking up the theoretical challenge of defining what new media actually is, as well as discussing the particular contributions this reader makes to answering this question, I would like very briefly to sketch the history of the field for the benefit of whose who are newcomers to it. If we are to look at any modern cultural field sociologically, measuring its standing by the number and the importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications, conferences, and so on, we can say that in the case of new media (understood as computer-based artistic activities) it took about ten years for it to move from cultural periphery to the mainstream. Although SIGGRAPH in the U.S. and Ars Electronica in Austria have already acted as annual gathering places of artists working with computers since the late 1970s, the new media field begin to take real shape only in the end of the 1980s. At the end of the 1990s new institutions devoted to the production and support for new media art are founded in Europe: ZKM in Karlsruhe (1989), New Media Institute in Frankfurt (1990) and ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) in the Netherlands (1990). (Jeffrey Shaw was appointed to be director of the part of ZKM focused on visual media while Frankfurt Institute was headed by Peter Weibel). In 1990 as well, Intercommunication Center in Tokyo begins its activities in new media art (it moves into its own building in 1997). Throughout the 1990s, Europe and Japan remained to be the best places to see new media work and to participate in high-level discussions of the new field. Festivals such as ISEA, Ars Electronica, DEAF have been required places of pilgrimage for interactive installation artists, computer musicians, choreographers working with computers, media curators, critics, and, since the mid 1990s, net artists.