new media

First entering the English vernacular in the 1990s, new media primarily refers to new modes of expression facilitated by media and based on information and communication technologies. Initially, this term was occasionally mistranslated as a new cultural form that was dependent on emerging technologies such as digital media and the internet, in contrast to traditional media. In the context of SMB, however, new media broadly encompasses all forms of artistic works and practices within three-dimensional space, as well as mutual exchanges of knowledge that unfold over time. In the catalogue for SMB01 city: between 0 and 1 (2000), digital culture theorist Lev Manovich’s essay Avant-garde as Software links the radical European avant-garde movements of the 1920s with the new media of the 1990s, explaining contemporaneous developments in information exchange and communication through computer software.