Armin Medosch will present his new book on the international art movement and network New Tendencies, who were important precursors of new media art and digital art. He examines the movement’s development in the context of social, political, and technological transformations—from the paradigm of industrial mass production to the information society. Key protagonists of New Tendencies such as Herbert W. Franke, Otto Piene, and Vladimir Bonačić were a strong early influence on Ars Electronica. New Tendencies emerged in 1961 in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. Rather than opposing the forces of technology, these artists imagined its rapid advance to become a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. They cast the viewer as the co-producer of the work and engaged in systematic visual research, anticipating key positions of participatory media art practices. In 1968 and 1969 the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, and in 1973 they presented dematerialized conceptual art practices side by side with computer art and constructive art.
New Tendencies—Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978), Leonardo Series, MIT Press, by Armin Medosch.
