Post-NMD?

Abstract

Chapter 9 offers a summary of our main arguments in this study and some questions arising from it. We state that NMD uses the technologies and the languages of contemporary media but is not the same as the ‘media’ broadly constituted, but has a materiality and a particular critical cultural presence. We argue that it deploys new media to counteract the ‘cognitive automatism’ (Berardi) and the bland anthropomorphism of contemporary media experience. In this way we suggest that it avoids the trap articulated by Peter Weibel, that there is no ‘escape from the media’ (Weibel, The Post-media Condition, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid: 2006). This means NMD is not reducible to postmedia, and that its core function, however influenced by digital media aesthetics, continues to be informed by the experimental art tradition more so than the flattened, affectless consumer experience of popular media. Accordingly, we note that it is not new media per se that has impacted most significantly on our study but, as Quaranta says, ‘the art that is most aware of the cultural, social and political consequences of the new media’ (Quaranta, The Postmedia Perspective, Rhizome: 2011). For us, this art is essentially dramaturgical, as its task is mediating but suspicious – critical and difficult to please. It is also a material practice which is inclusive of all the life forms of the art world, including and especially the non-human actors.

References

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