Exploration of new forms has been a modus operandi of the avant garde for over a century, and New Media is doubly implicated in this gesture of praxis. New Media implicitly signifies novelty by virtue of its name alone, but also through its definition that includes emergent (but primarily digital) artforms. As a subset of this, one could recurse by saying that art in virtual worlds could be a “New” New Media. Before devolving into satirical discussions of comparative novelty, it’s notable that “new” media are a locus of expansion of art praxis for centuries, including oil, print, and photography. However, is novelty sufficient cause to merit the consideration of virtual art? Beyond the maxim of “Art for Art’s Sake”, virtual world art is part of a historical arc of work that engages social relations.
~ Patrick Lichty – Artist, Curator, and Theorist
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Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
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