The artist in the postmodern age has a hard time using traditional art media because it is almost impossible to find anything more to say with them. The media have become so over-determined that at times it is difficult to see anything beyond the media themselves. Artists in the 20th century have traditionally countered this situation by evolving a more conceptual art practice which has 'freed' the artist from the determinations of a specific medium and need to 'master' it. For the conceptual artist, the idea is the artwork and it may as well be executed by a lorry driver.

For many decades the art elite have scorned the type of person who, discovering that they are (fortunate enough to be) talking to an artist, immediately ask: "Oh how interesting - painter or sculptor?". In the eyes of the cognoscenti such a question is proof of a person's cultural and intellectual inferiority because it shows that a) they are living somewhere in the mid 19th century and don't realise that art can be made out of bird droppings if that seems relevant, b) they assume all artists working in the same medium necessarily have something in common and c), it implies an artist has to chose a medium and stick to it. But with the emergence of the New Media Artist, many of the medium-related foe of by-gone days have returned.

As we approach the millennium we are once again more likely to hear what materials an artist is working with, i.e. digital electronic media, than their ideological or intellectual motivations. And why is it that when we hear this, we all nod our heads and act like we understand what those media īmean' and like it's a given that the new-media-determined artist must somehow be more progressive than the trad-media-determined artist of yesteryear? Of course digital media deeply alter the means of production, open up different contexts and accrue different symbolic and formal meanings, but the media cannot reveal this on their own. In other words the medium cannot be overly relied upon to produce the message any more than can a tube of oil paint. The problem is that by merely using it, the New Media Artist is secured (for the time being) a reputation of progressiveness and a position of socio-cultural power.

Over identification with the medium (or properly New Media) has also led to some artists using technology to make work almost exclusively about technology. This category of New Media Artist has come to resemble a new-age techno-priesthood in which technology is preached as the alpha and omega of our society - the all encompassing receptacle of meaning. Anybody attempting to contradict this obsessive rhetoric is instantly labelled an anachronistic humanist who does not realise that man and machine are inseparable, discontinuous, symbiotic entities. This concept, although only recently admitted to the pantheon of intellectual truisms (where it certainly deserves its place), has so powerfully taken hold that it seems unnecessary to eternally reiterate it. Has this revelation, in tandem with the advent of the information age, really become the all refracting prism and necessary gateway through which to approach all other ībig questions' ? Alternatively can't the big issues surrounding technology also be addressed by using donkey dung or any other equally disassociated material? These remarks are intended to be sweeping, for undoubtedly their cursory nature neglects many objections, exceptions and alternatives.

The cynical reading is this: New Media Art is a fairly astute area of art practice to get involved in. It requires a skill level long since abandoned by Old Media Art which presently guarantees a degree of exclusivity in the field. It is also something that art institutions have only recently cottoned on to and are therefore throwing money at hand over fist to make up for their embarrassing former neglect of the area. It also provides the opportunity for the arts to go into partnership with the hugely rich IT industry, which is pleased because their products gain all the right associations and artists even assist in the road-testing and development of software. In short, New Media Art is a growth industry still trading off its former minority status. Artists who have committed the time and the resources to gain the required know-how to make this work often seem to enter into an oppressively monogamous relationships with technology. This is a relationship which, in the worst cases, exchanges the hard-won freedoms gained by artists from the deterministic dogma of Old Media for a lot of new dogma gift-wrapped in visionary kudos and the promise of high social and maybe even financial rewards.

Josephine Berry [josie@metamute.com]