Abstract

Challenging the widely popular techno-centric and progress-oriented perspective which presents current New Media as the unprecedented model achievements of the Digital Revolution's scientific and engineering technological advances, this study argues that the new digital media are no less the continuity of a convergence of ideas evolving as much in the sciences as in the humanities and arts since the end of the Enlightenment. It proposes to re-think new media and their development via their interdependence with other fields of academic, scientific and artistic inquiry and through a media-archeological re-visitation of the past approach which emphasizes cyclical recurrence. Focusing on the intersection of the New Media with the world of (Western) Art, the study explores the reputedly new digital form referred to by "multimedia" today, as to its unprecedented nature in relation to artistic practice(s) and conceptions of Art as we are used to imagining them. The analysis is two-fold. The first part traces the origins of "multimedia" in avant-garde practices and visions of synthesis, from Western art history since Wagner, which resonate and dialogue with present ideas of synergy. The second part examines some recent art practices considered as "multimedia"--projects on CD-ROM--as to if and how they continue the aesthetic concepts outlined in the first section, as well as to the presence of any new dimensions specifically due to computerization. As it recontextualizes digital multimedia within a much broader frame of reference, this study presents new directions for alternative critical approaches to today's New Media that offer some balance by standing in contrast to the prevailing digital hype.