Prelude

April is a time for change, and ART news & views looks at this change through its celebration of New Media in this issue. A decade back artists began to combine image and text and over the last decade, these works have increased in subtlety and in the interplay of meanings. Today's new media artist opposes what he calls the old-fashioned “logocentric” Renaissance view of painting's “presence” with an art whose new apparatus include the notion of the institution and which uses today's primary means of communication-- photography, video, cinema and television.

The use of the despised medium, and a critique of the means of production have led the practitioners to cast conceptual art as gesture, not of denial but of opening up of the institution of art to the world outside, letting in other disciplines like linguistics, semiological analysis, political theory and above all psychoanalysis.

And this is exemplified in the art of Jitish Kallat, Raqs Media, Manjunath Kamath, and in the experimental art practised in virtual workshops. In this issue we take a look at artists like Jitish Kallat, Sheela Gowda, Raqs Media, Periferry, NS Harsha, Manjunath Kamath, Tushar Joag, New Media & its changing trend and the potential of a medium like facebook in developing an online workshop.

We hope that this will again turn out to be a fulfilling experience in reading. We look forward to your feedback so that we can continuously enrich your reading experience.

Happy reading.