“Media art is the way the world dreams about itself.”

The Poetics of Mediation

To speak about media art is to think about mediation itself — about those mutable relations in which the human, the machine, and the cohabiting world coexist and co-create.
Media art is not a style or genre, but rather a field of becoming where art, science, and computational systems intertwine to reveal new forms of perception, connection, and creativity.

It does not merely use technology; it thinks through technology, transforming the medium from an instrument into a mode of cognition.
Thus, in media art, code becomes dialogue, data turns into emotion, and networks unfold as shared spaces of consciousness.
Through these processes, media art exposes the inner logic of contemporary existence — becoming the syntax of our epoch, the grammar through which the world speaks of itself and dreams of its own becoming.

From the Mechanics of Vision to Systems Thinking

The genealogy of media art can be traced deep within the history of vision itself.
The Renaissance perspective grid was, in essence, the first algorithm of space, while the camera obscura functioned as the prototype of mediated vision.
Over time, these optical devices evolved into dynamic systems: the phenakistiscope, praxinoscope, and zoopraxiscope united scientific observation and the illusion of motion, anticipating the idea that perception itself could be engineered.

When Thomas Wilfred, László Moholy-Nagy, and Jean Tinguely transformed light and movement into aesthetic material, they not only changed the visible forms of art but also demonstrated how energy could become data and technology could become a field of aesthetic thought.

Following the Second World War, art entered a new domain shaped by theories of communication and information.
The logical rigor of Alan Turing, the communicative model of Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics collectively transformed the foundations of perception.
They inspired artists to think in the languages of systems, relations, and feedback loops, setting the stage for an entirely new aesthetic paradigm.

It was within this climate that artists such as Vera Molnár, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr, and Michael Noll began writing algorithms capable of autonomous drawing, laying the groundwork for computational art — an art governed by rules, repetition, and emergence. For example, in her series “(Des)Ordres”, Vera Molnár designed algorithms capable of producing drawings without direct human intervention, establishing an aesthetics of “digital randomness.” For her, the computer did not replace the artist but opened a new space of thought where rule and chance became interlocutors in a creative dialogue.
Jack Burnham would later define this shift as systems aesthetics, asserting that “change emanates not from things but from the way things are done.”
Meanwhile, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell transformed television into both medium and metaphor — turning the screen into a mirror of our perception itself.

Through all these practices, art began to move from object to process, from medium to mediation, fulfilling Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message.”

New Materiality: The Ecology of the Digital Body

Digital art is often perceived as immaterial, yet every algorithm has a body and a weight.
The chains, minerals, energy, and human labor that sustain digital infrastructures remind us that behind the illusion of weightlessness lies a dense material ecology.
As Christiane Paul observes, “the cloud also has a weight,” reminding us that the digital is never bodiless but deeply grounded in physical systems.

Her concept of neomateriality reveals the true nature of digital objects: they are not merely images or data, but active bodies that sense and respond to their environments.
Similarly, Oliver Grau reminds us that the history of media art has always been an ongoing flow between body and image, while Bernard Stiegler’s notion of hypermateriality points to a state where matter and form can no longer be distinguished.

In this light, media art uncovers the geological strata hidden beneath the screen’s surface — showing that the virtual is not a negation of the physical but an expanded and intensified form of it.

The Grammar of the Digital

Lev Manovich understands digital culture as a grammar composed of five principles: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.
These principles interweave to form a living language in which numbers become narratives and computation becomes sensation.
This new grammar is at once mechanical and symbolic, teaching us to think in the syntax of systems and to create in the rhythmic pulse of networks.

Media Archaeology and Nonlinear Lineages

The development of media art has never followed a linear trajectory.
Siegfried Zielinski and Jussi Parikka propose media archaeology as a spiral genealogy — one that reveals forgotten devices and mechanisms as alternative chronologies of technological memory.
Every new medium, they suggest, reanimates the old not as a relic of the past but as a renewed form of perception.

Such an approach resists the linear narrative of Western progress, proposing instead a polycentric and multitemporal history where the new and the old coexist, resonate, and continuously transform one another.

From Dematerialization to Rematerialization

In the 1960s, Lucy Lippard famously described the dematerialization of the art object, signaling a shift from object to process.
However, in the digital age, this movement reversed itself into what might be called rematerialization.
Media art reintroduced matter — yet not as a static object, but as a fusion of data, energy, and device.
Christiane Paul notes that this new materiality reveals how digital processes render the invisible tangible, making the digital not abstract but lived, sensory, and experiential.

Feminist and Global Genealogies

The history of media art is equally a history of gender, geography, and care.
If cybernetics was born in the laboratories of war, digital art emerged in spaces of relation — around the body, vulnerability, and interdependence.
Feminist media art reconfigures the algorithms of control, transforming them into mirrors of sensation and empathy.

Artists such as Lauren Lee McCarthy expose the gendered layers of technological subconsciousness; Morehshin Allahyari, in her Material Speculation series, resurrects destroyed cultural bodies; Tabita Rezaire weaves together the memory of the Black body with cosmotechnological energy; and Tega Brain reveals the ecology of data, presenting the algorithm as a form of coexistence.

In their works, code becomes a language of care and resistance.
Here, new materiality is not merely a politics of matter but a politics of relation — revealing that digital culture is not a neutral field but a system woven from emotions, labor, and attentiveness.

Across Asian, African, and Central American contexts, alternative computational imaginaries are emerging — grounded in local cosmotechnics and open-source knowledge.
This global polyphony challenges technological monocentrism, highlighting the plural nature of the digital that unfolds at the intersections of languages, bodies, and knowledges.

The Post-Digital Condition

When the digital ceased to be new and became the fabric of reality itself, media art began to operate on a different plane of consciousness.
Artists such as Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Ian Cheng, Eduardo Kac, Anicka Yi, and Guy Ben-Ary reveal how digital infrastructures are simultaneously material and invisible — omnipresent yet elusive.

Christiane Paul defines this condition as the age of new materiality, in which digital systems are embedded within the very substance of objects and images.
Tiziana Terranova deepens this idea, writing that “immateriality is the link between materialities.”
Thus, the post-digital does not signify a time after the digital but rather a form of awareness within it — a state in which matter becomes a data reflection and data becomes an ecological signal.

Toward Media Ecologies

Today, media art extends from laboratories into ecosystems and planetary networks.
It maps the invisible infrastructures — satellites, sensors, and supply chains — that weave the biosphere together with code.
Every act of communication becomes an ecological event; every computation, a planetary gesture.

To practice media art, therefore, is to cultivate ecological intelligence: to create with living systems and to perceive technology as an active participant in nature’s metabolism.
Here, the technical transforms into the poetic, the mechanical becomes sentient — and it is precisely here that the future begins to learn how to feel.

Toward Shared Futures

Ultimately, media art can be understood as a rehearsal — a field for collective futures where societies learn empathy, restore ecologies, and reimagine coexistence.
Through art, technology learns to feel; and through technology, art learns to understand the world.

References

Burnham, J. (1968). Systems Esthetics. Artforum, 7(1), 31–35.
Grau, O. (2010). MediaArtHistories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lippard, L. (1973). Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger.
Paul, C. (2020). Digital Art Now: Histories of (Im)Materialities. International Journal for Digital Art History, 5.
Stiegler, B. (2009). Économie de l’Hypermatériel et Psychopouvoir. Paris: Mille et une Nuits.
Terranova, T. (2005). Immateriality and Cultural Production. Tate Modern Symposium.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. MIT Press.
Zielinski, S., & Parikka, J. (2013). Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. University of California Press.

Credit: Vera Molnar, De La Serie (Des) Ordres (detail), 1974. Courtesy of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection