The Walker Art Center, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, is a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences. Its programs span the visual arts, performing arts, film/video, and new media. Walker's online presence is an extension of this mission and includes the Walker site (http://www.walkerart.org), a collaborative educational site, ArtsConnectEd (http:// www.artsconnected.org), and “Gallery 9” (http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/), devoted to networked digital arts. These efforts are maintained by the department of “new media initiatives,” founded in 1996.

NEW
The content of a new medium is always an old medium.
Marshall McLuhan

We take this as a hydra-headed warning. What seems new may simply be putting a camera in the fifth row from the theater's proscenium. Filming a play was not yet cinema.

By the same token, while we may have replaced the idea of a linear, progressing history with notions of cycles, discontinuities, revolution, complexity, and even parallel conspiracies, new is not without history. While acknowledging the fluidity of much contemporary digital activity, we seek to find compelling contexts for it.

MEDIA
Computers both produce the material we experience and allow us to access it. … To paraphrase Turing, the computer is the medium that can be any medium.
Simon Biggs

Understanding what constitutes the medium may be even more difficult than defining what is new about it. As a meta-medium, we tend to view new media through the prism of our own experience and knowledge, whether it is video or photography, publishing or visual arts. As a meta-medium, digital media can be like electricity, both object and subject, both what makes things run and something to run with. As a meta-medium, computability may contribute to the breakdown of distinct disciplines while suggesting something distinctive.

INITIATIVES
The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored.
Freeman Dyson

The answers to these and other questions cannot be answered only hypothetically. Artists, designers, information architects, interfacers, artificers, screeners, minglers, curators, and producers will use the new tools to create new things that must be explored and, eventually, understood. (Steve Dietz, Curator of New Media)