Blast. Jordan Crandall.

«I think it is important to resist conceptions of the net as an autonomous, dehierarchised communications setting ­ for the net is embedded in built realities, informed through specific cultural localities as it in turn is embroiled in urban processes. It is involved in the formation of new forms of individual and collective identification that only partly transcend local, embodied specificity. It is both located and dislocated. The net is highly heterogeneous, choppy, cut through with uneven and antagonistic elements ­ it is never as smooth and uniform as it might seem, particularly as the media likes to portray it. It is constituted by tangles of diverse micro-networks. It is a distributed system, yes, but it is embroiled in the creation of new hierarchies and centers.

With a revolutionary infrastructure that allows exciting new kinds of presences and modes of articulation, and which seems to bypass the structures of mediation that we have come to know, one could truly see the net in terms of ‘post-media,’ especially for the most part of this decade. However, poised as it is today for colonization by commercial interests, we can also see it as a powerful extension of the reach of the media, in the time of transition from industrial society, with its economies of mass production, to network society, with its just-in-time individualized economies, which are able to hail viewers on a one-to-one level. Right now it is a crucial time, a time when the new presences enabled by the network must stake their claims and the status of the net as a public space must be fought for. At a time when corporations are mobilizing to create and control the voice-video-data networks that will extend the net as we know it, it is a time of serious thought as to what strategies are open to artists and critical media producers».
 

Gallery 9 / Walker art Center. Steve Dietz.

"The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but, rather, with accessing and using previously accumulated media in new ways. In this respect, new media is postmedia or supermedia: it uses old media as its primary material. From "New Vision," new typography, new architecture of the 1920s we move to New Media of the 1990s; from "A Man with a Movie Camera" to a user with a search engine, compositing program, image-analysis program, visualization program; from cinema, the technology of seeing, to a computer, the technology of memory. . . . "I do hope that the new generation of students who are growing up with computers will use them as a true medium for the cultural expression of the generation
--but not simply to make videos, arrange music, or design clothes-- but, rather, to design software and interfaces themselves. In other words, they might express themselves through software design the way previous generations expressed themselves through books and movies".

If the present represents a kind of pre-postmedia state, where digital recombinants no longer signify a difference that makes a difference, what is the potential of postmedia?

We await our Proust or Welles to express themselves through software and interface design. Is this a new medium? Or as Manovich also suggests, is it about "new ways of accessing and manipulating information," where querying databases, navigating space, coding interfaces are tools--like a pencil or a camera?

Pencil and camera, of course, were never mediums, but they supported ones that had fixed and distinctive characteristics, the book and the movies. Postmedia may also have distinctive characteristics--as a metamedium, as interactive, as network--but these are variable and dynamic processes, which do not fit the model of transmission as fundamentally fixed media.

In the postmedia era, the most difficult task may be to relinquish how we understand a medium in order to accomodate successful work. As heretofore fixed boundaries between media, between knowledge domains, between delivery systems--traditional crutches of critical appraisal--become less and less meaningful, how to understand the new world order? In terms of signal to noise? Reach vs. recall? As a data array of usability vs. elegance? Probably not, although these may be the stepping stones of a necessary evolution of understanding to parallel the revolution of cultural expression».
 

Rhizome. Rachel Greene & Alex Galloway 

«The postmedia era will be characterized by widespread distribution and varied uses of media--a vast network of temporary autonomous zones. As real material conditions change, media will be less "controlled" than previously seen. New forms such as RHIZOME.org, net.radio/MP3, and electronic civil disobedience will dot a more diverse and fluid landscape. Postmedia media will be subject to the same permutations, interpretations and uses as any other form of data, yet it will become more radically democratic».