Responses to 09-09 Exit Ticket

Our Exit Ticket from 09/09 only had one question. (My bad for not prompting you all to fill it out.)

Are social media platforms a good place for looking at new media art? (To me although recommendation algorithms help with exposing the genre, seems like the ones that are “favored” are mostly sketches or quick visual based experiments, and more conceptual works might not get that much attention…?)

Social media is an excellent place to find new media art. It seems straightforward for artists who work with computer media to publicize their work via computer media. By coincidence, yesterday, Casey Reas (co-creator of Processing) just crowdsourced a list of 200 new media artists who actively share work in social media. This list is also linked below. There are two caveats worth mentioning about it:

  • This list is specifically of artists who post work regularly (e.g. daily) and directly to Twitter and Instagram, such as @shedrawswithcode (Jessica In) and @alidasun.
  • Because of the above, this list is heavily biased towards artists whose channels contain lots of small sketches. Many new media artists don’t work this way, or create work (like installations and performances) that doesn’t exist as a square video. For example, Rafael Lozano Hemmer and Camille Utterback are terrific new media artists, but their work consists of big installations that are documented on their personal web sites. Although they have social media feeds, they don’t use those channels the same way. To find work like theirs, look in blogs like creativeapplications.net, or channels like Media Art Tube.

Additionally, there are also hashtags you can follow for aggregations of work of this kind. For example: