Visual communication design as an interdisciplinary field has emerged with the new media. It includes fields such as: graphic design, 2-D and 3-D animation, photography, video, web and multimedia design. The most important feature distinguishing Visual Communication Design from traditional design is that it’s interdisciplinary and produces for digital and virtual interactive media as well as real media. Contemplating internet as a field of design in the context of virtual and digital media will provide the revision of the current design education and also contribute to the better comprehension of the works.

By the rapid development in computer technology and the extension in its uses, emergence of digital transfer, recording, reproduction and representation techniques, internet has hastily become a part of everyday-live all over the world; not just as a communicative tool but also as an artistic medium that can be called ‘new’, and as a ground to political, cultural and economical struggle. The internet, emergence of which dates back to thirty years ago and its widespread use covers the last fifteen years, should be considered as one of the most important paths in the expansion of visual culture. The rapidness of its development and its influence on a great deal of our lives makes it hard to fully grasp the potential and possibilities it embodies. Following its onset, internet was soon adapted in art, became the means to the global economy as a field where e-commerce rules, on the other hand turned into a kind of ‘information source’ and has become a communication tool with the widespread use of electronic mail. Moreover, it is regarded as a sort of market, bearer of the Enlightenment ideology, harbinger of nation-state’s demise, a technology for creating private space, and foreseen to become the public space of the mute marginals composing the majority. (Stratton, 2002: 80-97)

For artistic productions and design practices; computer, digital technology and internet offer production fields and technical possibilities quite distinctive from traditional media such as painting, photography, sculpture. Within the context of visual culture, it could easily be adduced that the expansion and accessibility in the possibilities of production and presentation, have differentiated the relation between the artwork and the audience. Moreover, the new media by offering discrete production fields and technical means, brings about a new sense of aesthetics.

The art practices such as internet art, net-art, ‘ascii-art’, ‘mail-art’, ‘spam-art’, ‘glitch art’, and the concepts such as cyberspace, multimedia, interaction, ‘online’, interface, ‘real-time’, ‘network’, hypermedia, hardware, software and wetware should be recognized as the reflections of this field that is now entitled as new media. During a process where not just art production or design practices, but also multifarious social practices such as communication, cultural life and urban life are going through a change, the digital media has long established its place in contrast to conventional art media, and is gradually expanding the space it occupied against the other. Conventional media have even been assimilated into the domain of new media.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ant Scott, BX425, 2005.

 

The transition from older media such as: printing technologies, photography, cinema, TV, video, to the computer-based new media such as: internet, web, CD, DVD, evidently overlaps with the transition from the industrial societies to post-industrialist societies. According to Manovich Lev, three fundamental features are to be mentioned regarding this transition. Firstly, the existent media is converted into digital data accessible through computer media. Secondly, while the objects of traditional media were identical to each other, in other words there was a standardized production at stake, the objects of new media are characterized by their variability and customized by their users. Finally, the main concern of traditional media was about the way of production, the new media’s basic issue is accessibility to the already present works. (Lev, 2001:18-39)

Now not just ‘reality’, but also ‘virtual reality’ (Mirzoeff and Virilio) ‘simulation’ and ‘hyperreality’ (Baudrillard); not just ‘space’, but also ‘cyberspace’, ‘cybersociety’, ‘cyberculture’, ‘cybernetic state’, ‘cyber power’, ‘netropolice’ (Boyer) or ‘city of bites’ (Mitchell) are being mentioned. To put it in Mitchellian way: neighborhood is replaced by cyber communities, face to face by interface, public space by the right of public access, and real estate by cyberspace. Boyer also indicates a similar transformation: the modern city and the city space without community turns into a metaphor for the now disembodied, computerized cyberspace. City and the public space become more and more virtual during the gradual replacement of face to face communication by the interpersonal communication systems in Netropolice. (Boyer, 1996, 220)

Digital Art, Net-art

As posited before, internet is not only a digital communication tool but also a medium for artistic production. It is thus possible to regard the internet art as a transmission beyond national borders and a sharing medium and claim it to embody ‘multifarious reciprocal effects against the division separating borders and global narratives’ (BitStreams, 2001: 27)

The replacement of the traditional passive relationship between the artwork and its audience by an interactive one is one of the most important possibilities provided. The long-rooted synchronic tradition andspatial installations based on the existence of participants at the same space and time hands the floor to an asynchronic medium where communication expands into an unknown flow of time, the participants come and go randomly (Mitchell,2000: 74). It could be claimed that this change has shaken the roots of Modernism and resolved the conventional cultural spheres.

It is no longer possible to mention a stationary, fixed and finished work of art. Within an interactive relationship, the work could be changed, renewed both by its audience or producer at any moment. There are even certain works depending on this interaction which could be directed by the audience. This could be taken as an opportunity of the digital which is in harmony with the other cybermedia. In other words, it brings about a presentation where the distance between the artwork and its audience is removed and the audience becomes the part of the presentation. It should also be added that there is a global potential of audience which makes of it a phenomena that not only increases the number of audience but also affects the work in return. The work could be viewed as to the technical aspects of the computer used and the speed of internet connection.

The role that the mass communication systems play on the works, and their life on the internet render them too special to be in a museum or gallery. This very characteristics of net.art is also a way of challenging the hegemony in arts. Through the use of sound, motion and text this art gains new dimensions, cinematic qualities and becomes interactive with certain tools. The interface prevented it from linearity and turned into multi-layered artworks that are open to new interpretations. (Ulay, 2001: 49) Saul Anton calls the internet art as interface art and sees the fertile ground of the variations of interface art as the return to the performance dimension previously eradicated by the various recording devices on a plane.

The digital technology made up of binary codes as ‘0’ and ‘1’, ‘open’/close circuits which can reach out to everywhere and everything from ‘now’ and ‘here’, removes the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’, makes countless copies and provokes interference. And it still is at its beginnings. Considering the long history of painting, photography and cinema; the horizons of new media remains beyond the limits of predictions. The new medium functions through becoming widespread by encapsulating the conventional means of mass communication and irrevocably narrowing down its scope which represents a very transition process.

In the light of the above arguments, digital medium obviously presents a new language, narrative and production techniques of its own. The internet and other digital media influencive in most part of our lives, offer their users opportunities such as: interaction, ‘online’, virtuality, asynchronic communication, multi-media, ‘real time’ and interface. The widespread use of technology and its accessibility frees the artistic production from the hands of an elitist circle to a larger whole and popularizes it. The medium we now share could be claimed to be more ‘democratic’ and global where the national borders no longer make sense as the way they used to do. The interferences of art critics, galleries and other intermediary institutions in the presentation and viewing of the artistic products become almost useless. It is now possible for a work to reach out the world only by a website.

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REFERENCES

‘BitStreams and 010101, An Online SymbosiumBir Sempozyum.’ Sanat Dünyamız, no. 81, pp 27-45 (2001)
Boyer, M. Christine (1996) CyberCities/ Visual Perception in The Age of Electronic Communication. Princet”on Architectureal Press.
Lev, Manovich (2001) The Language of New Media, MIT Press.
Mitchell, J. William (2000) ‘Bit’ler Şehri: Mekan, Yer ve Bilgi Otoyolu’. m, no. 7, pp 74-75.
Stratton, Jon (2002) ‘Siberalan ve Kültürün Küreselleştirilmesi’, Cogito, no. 30, pp 80-97.
Ulay, Faruk (2001) ‘Tek Başına Ama Hep Birlikte: Net.Sanat’. Sanat Dünyamız, no. 81, pp 47-50.
Uçkan, Özgür (2000) ‘Arakhne Daidolos ile buluşuyor:Ağkent.’ m, no. 7, pp 68-73.