Introduction to New Media

      Rush introduces his book with a reminder that it is difficult to understand the sporadic birth of new media with the quote: “While the use of new media in art does have a history, it is not easily delineated. This history has yet to be written, largely because it is always developing (9).” This is important to keep in mind when studying new media because like a piece of artwork, its development and history must be viewed from many perspectives in order to understand it. And following Duchamp’s idea about art, new media is being defined not only by the artists but by the viewers.  
An idea from the development of new media is Bergson’s Philosophy of a universal hunger for understanding time and how it is reflected in art. It is interesting how this desire to understand time has lead to its manipulation. This video is an example of how humans play with time through new media. I think I would be cool however if the woman in the video was with the same background, shirt, hair, etc for the five years.
      It is also interesting to look at how the coexistence of art and technology has influenced the development of new media. Rush describes tension between art as an industrial process v.s. art based on “pure feeling”. I find it extremely unsettling that art can be both a creation based on mathematics and engineering and it a creation based on random “chance” (as argued by Cage.) This self contradictory-concept of art is difficult to grasp but is demonstrated in Cunningham's video which I see as a bridge between both sides of the artistic spectrum
The question I was left with after Rush's introduction is how far are the boundaries between art as exact and art as spontaneous? With today's technology it seems like emerging artists must either struggle to find a balance between the two or push the boundaries even farther.