The MultiPlasticity of New Media

The Virtual Medium

At the beginning of the 21^st century, Manovich(2001) declared that the first decades of the last century, the Early Age of Machines, have been more relevant to New Media culture than any other time period. “The earlier plastic art movements characterized the conceptual and structural basis of the virtual media with the spatial and kinetic methodologies activated by the user during its interaction processes”(Mura,2010). Manovich utilizes the term Meta-Media to describe contemporary works that coincides with a postmodernism's “ready-made” design concept of making new artefact from reinterpreting old artefacts. This New media Avant-Garde “is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information”(Manovich,2001) (e.g. hypermedia,databases,search engines etc.). Meta-media is an example of how quantity can change into quality as in new media technology and manipulation techniques can “recode modernist aesthetics into a very different postmodern aesthetics”(Manovich,2001).