Movements, Groups & Collectives

1800–1850

• Romanticism, a European movement in art, literature and music, emphasizing the individual and the imagination, as a reaction to the Enlightenment. Artists include William Blake, J. M. W Turner, John Constable (British), Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix (French), Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Runge (German), among others.

Artworks

1814

• The Third of May, 1808, Francisco Goya (Spanish), depicting Spanish Resistance to Napoleon’s armies.

1818–1819

• The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault (French), French Romanticism.

Social & Political Context

1801

• Thomas Jefferson elected president of USA; the beginning of Manifest Destiny.

1804

• Napoleon crowned emperor of the French Republic.
• Haiti won independence from France, becoming the first republic governed by former slaves.

1807

• The slave trade was declared illegal in Britain and the USA. Although trading slaves was now illegal, slavery itself persisted.

1810

• University of Berlin founded; students include philosophers Hegel and Karl Marx.
• Wars in Latin America for independence from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (until 1830).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1801

• Jacquard’s punch-card loom invented. The punch card is a precursor of the digital binary system (France).

1804

• The active ingredient morphine was isolated from opium by F. W. A. Sertürner (Germany), allowing more accurate doses of it as a medicine. Widely used clinically as an effective analgesic.

1804–1806

• Lewis and Clark expedition into the American West.

1807

• Humphry Davy, a British chemist, isolated potassium and sodium.

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1830–1870

• Barbizon School of painting in the Barbizon region of France; rural life was portrayed in a naturalistic way, leading to the Realist art movement. Artists include Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, and Jean-François Millet, among others (French).

Social & Political Context

1829

• Black War, Tasmania, resulting in the decimation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population.

1830

• The Indian Removal Act in USA led to the removal and relocation of Native Americans. The Trail of Tears was an act of ethnic cleansing and genocide on a massive scale (until 1850).

1831

• Nat Turner, an American slave, led the only slave rebellion in the USA (Jerusalem, VA).

1833

• Slavery Abolition Act banned slavery throughout the British empire.

1838

• Victoria crowned British queen, beginning a new era of empire building.

1839

• Opium Wars, leading to the decline of the Chinese Qing dynasty (until 1860).
• Anglo-Afghan Wars in Afghanistan (until 1919). Tensions continue unresolved to the present day.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1820

• Discovery of Antarctic ice shelves by a Russian expedition.

1825

• Stockton and Darlington Railway in northern England became the first railway to use steam locomotion.

1830

• Charles Babbage envisioned the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (designs for a mechanical computer controlled by punch cards). Ada Lovelace created the first instruction routines for the Analytical Engine (UK).

1831

• The British explorer Charles Darwin’s voyage in HMS Beagle. His scientific observations led to important theories on evolution and natural selection (until 1836).

1836

• Samuel Colt began to manufacture the Colt-Peterson revolver, which could fire six bullets without reloading manually (USA).

1839

• Invention of photography by L. M. Daguerre (France) and W. H. Fox Talbot (UK).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1963

• ‘Exposition of Music – Electronic Television’: Nam June Paik’s (Korean) first exhibition, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal (Germany), with prepared TVs, deconstructed pianos, and an interactive dismantled audio tape player.

Organizations & Spaces

1962

• Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ (USA): an American industrial research and scientific development company that became a centre for early computer art, artists include Michael Noll and Aaron Marcus; computer animation artists Edward E. Zajac, Frank Sinden, and Kenneth C. Knowlton; and computer music artists Max V. Mathews and John R. Pierce (Americans).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1962

• Fluxus – an international collection of over sixty artists, composers and writers – founded by George Maciunas (Lithuanian American). Fluxus artists embraced the connection between art and life, and created experimental work involving live events and performances, as well as interdisciplinary artworks using found objects. The artists championed art as process, not as finite object. Notable artists include Nam June Paik (Korean American), Dick Higgins (American), Alison Knowles (American), Joseph Beuys (German), John Cage (American), Allan Kaprow (American), Shigeko Kubota (Japanese), Yoko Ono (Japanese) and Terry Riley (American), among others (until 1978).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1964

• Understanding Media: The Extension of Man: Marshall McLuhan (Canadian) defined media as an extension of the body.

Artworks

1960

• Anaglyph, computer-aided artwork, Béla Julesz (Hungarian American) at Bell Labs (USA).

1961

• Spatiodynamic and Cybernetic Light Tower of Liège, Nicolas Schöffer (French), a 52-metre-high cybernetic sculpture, Palais des Congrès in Liège, involving movement, music and light (Belgium).
• Catalog, animation reel, John Whitney (American).

1962

• Gaussian Quadratic, computer-generated drawing, Michael Noll (American). Created at Bell Labs (USA).
• Oracle, assemblage (from found metal) with five remote-controlled radios, Robert Rauschenberg with Toby Fitch, Harold Hodges and Billy Klüver (Americans). Wireless transistor circuitry developed at Bell Labs (until 1965) (USA).
• Code, Anni Albers (German American). In her woven textiles, Albers sought to demonstrate that textiles can convey complex ideas. Albers was a student of the Bauhaus, and eventually became the head of the weaving workshop, introducing new technologies and materials to weaving while working there, before moving to the USA in 1933.

1963

• BEFLIX programming language for creating bitmap computer movies constructed by Kenneth Knowlton (American). Developed into TARPS language used to create the PoemField series, of animated movies 1965–1969 by Knowlton and Stan VanDerBeek (American).
• Random Access, interactive dismantled audio tape player, by Nam June Paik (Korean American).

Social & Political Context

1960

• First televised presidential election debate in USA between Senator John Kennedy and Vice-President Richard Nixon.
• Year of Africa – seventeen African nations gained independence.

1961

• John F. Kennedy inaugurated as president of the USA (assassinated 22 November 1963).
• Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin became first man into space.
• East Germans began construction of the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Germany.

1962

• Algeria gained independence from France.
• Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear war narrowly averted.

1963

• Birmingham Campaign in USA demanding desegregation.
• The Beatles released their first album, Please, Please Me, in Britain to great acclaim. Beatlemania ensued.
• Martin Luther King Jr gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, USA (assassinated 1968).

1964

• Civil Rights Act passed in America for equality for all citizens.
• Vietnam War (until 1975).
• Khrushchev was ousted by Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1960

• NASA launched Echo 1 satellite and Echo 2 satellite in 1964, which improved satellite tracking and ground station technology (USA).
• The first laser, built in California at Hughes Research Laboratories, offered many medical, lighting and other applications (USA).
• The oral contraceptive pill became available (USA).

1961

• Konrad Zuse (German) created the first large format pen plotter (used by artist Frieder Nake) (Germany).

1962

• Telstar 1 satellite launched, developed by Bell Laboratories, the first active communications satellite for two-way communications (USA).

1963

• Douglas Engelbart (American) invented the computer mouse.

1964

• NASA launched Mariner 4 Space Probe from Cape Kennedy to photograph Mars (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1965

• First exhibition of computer art: ‘Computergrafik’, at Studiegallerie Technical University, Stuttgart (Germany), in the ‘Ästhetisches Colloquium’ seminar offered by Max Bense. Works by Georg Nees (Germans).
• ‘Computer-Generated Pictures’ at Howard Wise Gallery, New York (first computer art exhibition in the USA). Works by A. Michael Noll (American) and Bela Julesz (Hungarian American), both of whom worked at Bell Labs.
• ‘Computer-Grafik’: exhibition of Frieder Nake’s (German) computer plotter drawings at Galerie Wendelin Niedlic, Stuttgart (Germany).

1966

• ‘Kunst-Licht-Kunst’, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (Netherlands). First major exhibition of light art.
• ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’ at the New York 69th Regiment Armory. A series of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) groundbreaking technology-based works for theatre, dance, music and performance art featuring artists – Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Robert Whitman, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay, Lucinda Childs (Americans) and Öyvind Fahlström (Swedish) – in collaboration with engineers and scientists from Bell Labs (USA).

1967

• Constructive Tendencies from Czechoslovakia, at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. With six Czech artists. Featuring the first computer art by Zdenĕk Sỳkora (Czech).

1968

• ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, ICA, London. The first large international exhibition of electronic, cybernetic and computer art (UK). Curated by Jasia Reichardt (Polish British). Travelled to Washington DC and San Francisco (USA).
• ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’, exhibition at MOMA, NYC, curated by K. G. Pontus Hultén (Swedish) (USA).

1968–1969

• Consecutive exhibition, ‘Some More Beginnings’: E.A.T. international competition for engineer–artist collaborations, leading to an exhibition of over 100 works at Brooklyn Museum, New York. Heart Beats Dust, an installation by artist Jean Dupuy (French) and engineer Ralph Martel (American) won the competition (USA).

1969

• ‘TV as a Creative Medium,’ exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery in New York (1969), the first exhibition dedicated to video art (USA), featuring Wipe Cycle (1968), a seminal video installation by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider (Americans),

Organizations & Spaces

1967

• Museum Computer Network (MCN): an informal grouping of museums in the New York City area, with a members-only conference focusing on computers and their potential applications in museums the following year (USA).

1968

• Leonardo scholarly journal in partnership with MIT Press, founded by Frank Malina (American) (USA).
• The Computer Technique Group (CTG), a Japanese art collective founded by engineering students Masao Kohmura and Haruki Tsuchiya (Japanese) in Tokyo, and funded by IBM Scientific Data Center.

1969

• ACM-SIGGRAPH, the international Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, formed by Sam Matsa (American) and Andries van Dam (Dutch American) (ongoing).
• Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) founded Amsterdam (the Netherlands), supporting composers, performers and video/multimedia artists (ended 2020).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1966

• E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) group established to develop collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers. Founded by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman (Americans). It officially launched in 1967 (USA).

1968

• György Kepes (Hungarian American), Professor of Visual Design at MIT, founded MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (USA).
• Ant Farm, founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (Americans), San Francisco. A radical art, design and architecture collective which also include Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier (Americans). Produced countercultural performances and media events (USA).

1969

• Video collectives: Raindance Corporation founded by Frank Gillette, NY; and Videofreex founded by David Cort, Mary Curtis Ratcliff and Parry Teasdale, Catskill Mountains (Americans) (USA).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1967

• The Medium Is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan (Canadian) and graphic designer Quentin Fiore (American). The title is a play on McLuhan’s original phrase (the medium is the message) denoting the powerful effects of popular media on the human sensorium.
• Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Frank Popper (Czech and French British).

1968

• Leonardo peer-reviewed journal of art/science/technology established by artist/scientist Frank Malina (American) in Paris (France).
• Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, Jack Burnham (American).

Artworks

1965

• Computer Composition with Lines, Michael Noll (American): a computer-generated Mondrian, using the IBM 7094 (which was also used for the Apollo landing). Noll subsequently developed a Turing recognition test to see if machine and man-made works were distinguishable from one another.
• FORTRAN STATEMENT, Colette Steube Bangert (American): a collage of coloured fabric and computer text, unifying the representation of a landscape with computer-sourced imagery.
• Computer-Generated Ballet, computer-generated video, Michael Noll (American). The first use of a computer to create an animation of figures on stage (USA).
• Nr. 2 (‘Hommage à Paul Klee’), computer-generated drawing, Frieder Nake (German).
• Variations V, composer John Cage; dancers Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, Barbara Lloyd, Sandra Neels, Albert Reid, Peter Saul, Gus Solomons Jr; video projections by Stan VanDerBeek (Americans); TV distortions by Nam June Paik (Korean American). An interactive, intermedia dance performance (USA).

1966

• Movie-Drone, an immersive dome-shaped movie theatre with multiple projectors to create dense, layered video experiences, Stan VanDerBeek (American), Stony Point, New York (USA).

1967

• Hummingbird, computer-generated animation, Charles Csuri (American). One of the earliest examples of computer-animated film, using a highly labour-intensive process. Over 30,000 computer-generated images were drawn directly on film using a microfilm plotter. Each frame was programmed using one punch card. Created at Ohio State University (USA).

1969

• Interruptions, computer-generated drawing, Vera Molnár (Hungarian French). In 1959 Molnár developed the ‘imaginary computer’, a system of procedural steps for creating drawings. Access to a real computer and plotter in 1968 enabled her to realize the greater possibilities and variables of a computational approach to art making (France).
• Permutations, computer animation, John Whitney (American), an IBM research project (USA).
• Computer Drawings, Frederick Hammersley (American): seventy-two computer drawings created using the computer program ART 1, 350 statements written in the programming language FORTRAN IV, at University of New Mexico (USA).
• Simulated Color Mosaic, Hiroshi Kawanu, Japanese pioneer of computer arts, created a mosaic-like hand-coloured scroll with colour derived from a computer-generated probability matrix.

Social & Political Context

1965

• Death of Winston Churchill (UK).
• Voting Rights Act in USA bans racial discrimination in voting.
• Singapore gains independence from Britain.

1965–1986

• Ferdinand Marcos becomes president of the Philippines, imposing martial law.

1967

• Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab States of Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
• Summer of Love in San Francisco (USA).

1968

• The Troubles in Northern Ireland, a mixture of nationalism, sectarianism and British politics and unrest that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement (1998).
• Civil unrest throughout France.

1969

• Richard Nixon becomes president of the United States until 1974.
• Cult killing of actress Sharon Tate, and some of her friends, at her home by the Manson Family, led by Charles Manson (USA).
• Woodstock Music Festival in New York, 8–9 August (USA).
• Muammar Gaddafi coup d’etat in Libya (overthrown in 2011).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1965

• Referencing Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson coined the term ‘hypertext’ in the paper ‘Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate’ at the ACM National Conference, Cleveland, Ohio (USA).
• The first email system, MAILBOX used at MIT (USA)

1967

• Sony battery powered Portapak (the first portable video camera) released onto the market, making video recording accessible to experimental artists (USA).

1968

• Douglas Engelbart product demonstration at San Francisco Civic Auditorium of bitmapping, the first graphic user interface (GUI), showing direct computer input using a mouse and hypermedia. First translation of Vannevar Bush’s Memex into a human–computer interface (USA).
• First High Speed Rail opens in Japan, the Tokaido Shinkansen (nicknamed the Bullet Train).

1969

• The first internet connections between US universities SRI, UCSB, UCLA, UU using packet switching through the ARPANET program.
• Samsung Electronics founded in South Korea.
• Public Access television created in the USA, as non-commercial mass media (through 1971).
• First flight of the supersonic aircraft ‘Concorde’ from Toulouse, France.
• American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first people to step on to the surface of the Moon.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1970

• E.A.T., Pepsi Pavilion at the World Expo, Osaka (Japan): a geodesic dome covered with a water vapour cloud, with a spherical mylar-mirrored interior. Seventy-five artists were involved including Robert Breer (artistic director), Frosty Myers (light frame sculpture), David Tudor (spatialized sound), Tony Martin (lights), Robert Whitman (mylar sphere) (Americans), and Fujiko Nakaya (fog artist) (Japanese).
• Exhibition ‘Software’ (16 September–8 November), Jewish Museum, NYC, curated by Jack Burnham (American), presented a conceptual approach to software/hardware (USA).

1971

• ‘Computer Graphics – Une Esthétique Programmée’, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: an exhibition of Manfred Mohr’s (German) digital plotter drawings. The Benson flatbed plotter was situated in the exhibition for Mohr’s daily demonstrations (France).

1974

• The first general SIGGRAPH conference held in Boulder, Colorado. Led to the annual SIGGRAPH conference, regarded as a premier venue to present computer graphics research (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

1971

• The Kitchen Center for Video and Music, founded by Steina Vasulka (Icelandic American) and Woody Vasulka (Czech American), New York (USA).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1971

• Video Hiroba collective formed, Tokyo (Japan).

1972

• TVTV founded by Allen Rucker, Michael Shamberg, Tom Weinberg, Hudson Marquez (Americans), San Francisco, which included members of Videofreex and Ant Farm. The video collectives were comprised of independent video makers advocating for media decentralization and social change. They produced countercultural video-based projects using the Sony Portapak (USA).

1973

• Members of Warsztat Formy Filmowej / Workshop of Film Form (WFF) developed early video works (Poland).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1970

• Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood (American). An influential book in establishing the field of media arts. Youngblood discusses cinematic technologies that use new technologies such as video art, computers, multimedia environments, and holography.

1970–1974

• Radical Software, periodical for video art and independent video, founded by Phyllis Gershuny, Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (Americans), New York City. Published by Raindance Corporation. Contributions by Nam June Paik (Korean American), Douglas Davis, Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Beryl Korot, Charles Bensinger, Ira Schneider, Ann Tyng, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Gene Youngblood, Parry Teasdale (Americans), Juan Downey (Chilean) and Ant Farm. Eleven issues were published.

1971

• Guerrilla Television, Michael Shamburg (American), Raindance Corporation.

Artworks

1970

• A la recherche de Paul Klee, computer-generated drawing, Vera Molnár (Hungarian French).
• Pixillation, 16 mm film, Lillian Schwartz and Kenneth Knowlton (Americans).
• A Research on the Art World: Answers Given by Critics, Juan Downey (Chilean), polled 1,000 curators, critics and gallerists through a questionnaire and visualized the data in a series of works that revealed power structures in the art world. Downey was a pioneer in video and electronic art, connecting his interests in technology and Latin American rituals (USA).

1971

• 7 TV Pieces, David Hall (British), broadcast on STV (Britain).

1973

• M3X3, Analivia Cordiero (Brazilian), TV Cultura Studios, São Paolo. A groundbreaking computer dance performance where the choreography and cinematography were generated by the same computer program (Brazil).

1973

• AARON, artificial intelligence autonomous art creation system, created by Harold Cohen (American) (working until 2016).

1974

• Molndrian, computer-generated drawing, Vera Molnár (Hungarian French).

Social & Political Context

1970

• International Non-proliferation Treaty to limit the spread and number of nuclear weapons.

1971

• Nixon Shock – cancellation of the gold standard, dollars to gold, caused worldwide inflation.
• Greenpeace founded (UK).

1972

• Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. British soldiers shot twenty-six civilians during a protest march (UK).

1973

• USA Supreme Court decided for Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion (overturned in 2022).
• Sears Tower, Chicago, finished – 108-storey skyscraper (USA).
• Yom Kippur War, Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula and Suez Canal.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1970

• Masahiro Mori, Japanese roboticist, published ‘The Uncanny Valley’, positing that as robots become more human-like, a point is reached where inconsistencies with human appearance create an unsettling effect (Japan).
• First public flight of Boeing 747, New York to London.
• Cable multi-channel live television broadcasting initiated. Cable-only TV facilitated local TV stations and content (through 1979).

1971

• The world’s first commercial microprocessor, Intel 4004, a 4-bit CPU, was released (USA).

1972

• Pong, the first successful commercial video game, released by Atari (Japan).
• Magnavox Odyssey, the first successful computer home game video console released (USA).

1972–1973

• American Space Probe Pioneer 10 sent back first close-up images of Mercury.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1975

• Satellite Arts Project, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Americans). Artists in different locations performed together as a livestream, via satellite, creating ‘a performance space with no geographic boundaries’ (until 1977).

1977

• Send/Receive 1 and Send/Receive II, Liza Béar and Keith Sonnier (Americans). Satellite performance where artists on the east and west coast connected via satellite network.
• The Last Nine Minutes by Douglas Davis (American): live performance for international satellite, Documenta VI, Kassel (Germany). Part of a thirty-minute live telecast by Davis, Nam June Paik (Korean American), and Joseph Beuys (German), transmitted to twenty-five countries.

1979

• ‘Harold Cohen: Drawings’, San Francisco MOMA, featuring Cohen’s (American) AI drawing program AARON and his drawing machine ‘Turtle’. He described AARON as: ‘a complete and functionally independent entity, capable of generating autonomously an endless succession of different drawings’ (USA).
• First annual festival of Ars Electronica, Linz (Austria) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

1977

• Harvestworks not-for-profit arts organization founded by artists in New York City to support the creation and presentation of technology-based artworks (USA) (ongoing).

1978

• Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk), Amsterdam, founded by René Coelho (Dutch French) for artists working with new technologies (closed 2012).

1979

• Ars Electronica, an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz by Hannes Leopoldseder, Hubert Bognermayr, Herbert W. Franke and Ulrich Rützel (Austrians) (ongoing).
• MCN held the first of its annual conferences open to people outside of the group’s institutional membership in Washington, DC (USA).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1978

• London Video Arts (LVA) established (UK).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1976

• Video Art: An Anthology, edited by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (Americans).

Artworks

1975

• Dawn Burn, seven-channel synchronous video installation, continuous, Mary Lucier (American). Showing seven days of the sun rising over the East River, New York (USA).

1976

• I Am Abandoned, Barbara T. Smith (American): a performance exploring the masculine gendering of technology, featuring chatbots that talked to each other remotely during the performance, in ‘The Many Arts of Science’, Baxter Art Gallery, California Institute of Technology (USA).

1977

• Intuition, Sheila Pinkel (American): a film using photograms digitized using a drum scanner. The imagery was captured photographically from a TV linked to a computer, which mapped colours onto the scans. Pinkel studied with John Whitney (American) at UCLA (USA).
• Anasazi Series II, Sonya Rapoport (American): in this series a computer-generated mathematical analysis of patterns in Anasazi ceramics (printed on computer paper) was juxtaposed with hand-coloured motifs that visualized the same information, creating mosaic-like diagrammatic drawings.

1978

• Electric Patchwork, Joan Truckenbrod (American), the Fortran programming language was used to code abstract images that were printed onto textiles. Truckenbrod was a pioneer, fusing digital drawing, installations and textiles.

Social & Political Context

1975

• Saigon fell and ended the Vietnam War.
• Death of Franco. End of Dictatorship and reinstatement of the monarchy with King Juan Carlos I (Spain).
• The Killing Fields begins in Cambodia, mass murder committed by the communist Khmer Rouge regime.

1977

• Jimmy Carter inaugurated as US president.
• First Star Wars movie (USA).

1979

• Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. End of Khmer Rouge.
• Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown (USA).
• Margaret Thatcher appointed prime minister of Britain.
• Iranian college students invaded US Embassy in Tehran and took hostages.
• China implemented one-child policy to limit population.

1979–1989

• Soviet-Afghan War carried out by Mujahideen guerrillas backed by USA, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran against the Soviet state.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1975

• Altair 800, first commercially successful personal computer released, by MITS (USA).

1976

• VHS Home Video System released in Japan.

1977

• NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2 Space Probes to study outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (USA).
• Atari 2600 video game console released in USA.

1978

• Pluto’s moon Charon discovered by James Christy (American).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1980

• ARTBOX / ARTEX network. I. P. Sharp (Canadian) funded a network for a worldwide artists’ communications project, created by Robert Adrian (Canadian) (until 1989).

1981

• European Media Arts Festival founded, Osnabrück (Germany).

Organizations & Spaces

1981

• V2, Lab for the Unstable Media, founded in 1981, as an interdisciplinary centre for art and media technology in Rotterdam (Netherlands) (ongoing).
• Media-Space founded by Paul Thomas, Judy Chambers and Jeff Jones (Australians): a research centre based in Perth, Western Australia.

1983

• InterAcess founded in 1983 by Nina Beveridge, Bill Perry, Paul Petro and Geoffrey Shea (Canadians) in Toronto, Canada. A gallery, educational facility, production studio, festival and registered charity dedicated to new media and emerging practices in art and technology.

1984

• Postmasters Gallery founded by Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich (Polish Americans) in New York, representing young and established artists working conceptually and in new media art (USA) (ongoing).
• San Jose State University CADRE Laboratory (USA) founded by Joel Slayton (American).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1981

• Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard (French). Baudrillard defines simulacra as representations that no longer have a relationship to the real, and instead have their own reality as the hyperreal.

1984

• Art and Telecommunications, Eric Gidney (Australian), Roy Ascott (British), Tom Sherman (American Canadian) and Robert Adrian (Canadian).

Artworks

1980

• Hole-in-Space, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Americans): a public satellite broadcast set up to connect public spaces in LA and NYC, creating unexpected encounters (USA).
• Third Hand, Stelarc (Australian): a robotic hand attached to the body and controlled by EMG (electrical muscle signals). Created in Yokohama, Japan, and used by Stelarc in performances internationally. Stelarc extends his body through human-machine robotic and networked interfaces.

1984

• Electronic Café, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Americans), first operated a ‘telecollaborative network’, during the Summer Olympic Arts Festival, Los Angeles (USA), integrating social practice, technology, multimedia telecommunications and cross-cultural communications. It later led to the establishment of the Electronic Café International (1988).

Social & Political Context

1980

• Mount St Helens erupted (USA).
• Solidarity Union formed in Poland. Lech Walesa first democratically elected president since 1926.
• John Lennon murdered in New York (USA).

1981

• Ronald Reagan inaugurated president of the USA.

1982

• Falklands War between Britain and Argentina.

1983

• Suicide bombing of US Embassy in Beirut, 63 died (Lebanon).

1983–1985

• Famine in Ethiopia.

1984

• Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, assassinated.
• Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) emerged.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1980

• CNN launched as the world's first 24-hour news channel (USA).
• World Health Organization announces eradication of smallpox.

1981

• IBM PC released (USA).
• American cable channel, MTV, launched.
• IBM personal computer becomes available (USA).
• Silicon Graphics, a high-performance computer manufacturer, was founded in Mountain View, CA (USA).

1982

• The first computer touchpad was developed for the Apollo desktop computer.

1984

• VPL Research founded by Jaron Lanier (American), California. The company developed the EyePhone (head-mounted display), the DataSuit (body outfit with sensors) and the DataGlove (haptic glove). Jaron Lanier coined the term ‘virtual reality’.
• Apple debuts the Macintosh 128K personal computer, a desktop graphical user interface with clickable icons, built-in screen, and mouse; the first successful mass-market computer (USA).
• Software packages for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. developed (1980s).
• Wavefront Technologies (computer graphics) founded by Bill Kovacs (American), Santa Barbara, CA (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1987

• Prix Ars Electronica founded. Awarded annually by Ars Electronica, Linz (Austria), in electronic art and music categories (ongoing).
• Images Festival annual independent and experimental film, video art, new media and media installation festival, Toronto (Canada), founded (ongoing).
• DEAF – Dutch Electronic Art Festival founded in Rotterdam (Netherlands) by V2 artist collective.

1988

• First annual symposia of ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Utrecht (Netherlands) (ongoing).

1989

• Computer Space forum annual computer art festival, organized by the Student Computer Art Society (SCAS) in Sofia (Bulgaria), founded (ongoing).
• LA Freewaves, a non-profit that produces free, site-specific public art to engage artists and audiences on current social issues founded, Los Angeles, CA (USA) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

1985

• MIT Media Lab founded by Nicholas Negroponte (Greek American) and Jerome Wiesner (American), to conduct research in science, technology, multimedia, art and design, Cambridge, MA (USA).
• Squeaky Wheel artist-run, not-for-profit Film & Media Art Center established in Buffalo NY (USA) (ongoing).
• Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine, contemporary art centre in Geneva (Switzerland), founded to exhibit artworks using new technologies, directed by Andre Iten (Swiss?) (closed 2008).

1988

• The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) founded by the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (ongoing).
• Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI): an international not-for-profit organization devoted to increasing the visibility of art-sci work founded in New York City, by founder-director Cynthia Pannucci (American) (USA).

1989

• ZKM|Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany): a Center for Art and Media directed by Peter Weibel (Austrian) and Christiane Riedel (German) established under founding director Heinrich Klotz (German), combining research, production, exhibitions, events, an archive and a collection (ongoing).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1985

• A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (American): feminist posthumanist focus on moving beyond the boundaries of traditionally defined gender, feminism and politics.

1988

• The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (posthumous), Marshall McLuhan (Canadian) et al.

1989

• Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, by Margot Lovejoy (Canadian American). Lovejoy provided a comprehensive survey of the evolving relationship between art, artists and technology.

Artworks

1987

• Mona/Leo, digital composite, Lillian Schwartz (American). A pioneer of computer art, Schwarz created works in computer animation and digital collage at Bell Laboratories between 1969 and 2002.

1988

• 30x30, Zhang Peili (Chinese): the piece depicts repetitive routines, but is disorienting through unfamiliar framing and perspectives – raising questions about power relationships. Peili was the first video artist working in China.

1989

• Legible City, Jeffrey Shaw (Australian), interactive installation. Users navigate a simulated city with an architecture of words and phrases. Movement through the virtual city is powered by riding a stationary bike.

Social & Political Context

1985

• Mikhail Gorbachev took over leadership of Soviet Union.
• Iran-Contra affair (USA).
• Sunken liner Titanic discovered (Atlantic Ocean).

1986

• Dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines ended.
• Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster (Ukraine).

1988

• Mikhail Gorbachev began Glasnost.
• All passengers killed in bombing of Pan Am flight over Lockerbie (Scotland).

1989

• George Bush inaugurated as president of the USA.
• Exxon Valdez supertanker disaster, causing huge oil spillage off the coast of Alaska.
• Tiananmen Square Massacre, Beijing (China).
• Major earthquake in San Francisco Bay (USA).
• Fall of the Berlin Wall (Germany).
• Deposed leader of Romania, Nicolas Ceausescu, executed for genocide.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1985

• First Microsoft Windows operating system released, Windows 1.0 (USA).

1986

• Challenger Space Shuttle broke up; seven astronauts lost (USA).
• Adobe Illustrator developed

1987

• Telecommunications company Huawei founded in China.
• GIF Graphics Interchange Format introduced by CompuServe.
• Release of Microsoft Windows 2.0 (USA).

1988

• Softimage high-end 3D graphics application (developed in Canada), demonstrated at SIGGRAPH.

1989

• Tim Berners-Lee (British) proposed the World Wide Web at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland).
• Apple developed the Mac Portable (first portable Macintosh computer).
• Game Boy console released (Japan).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1990

• Artfutura international festival of Digital Culture and Creativity founded, Barcelona (Spain) (ongoing).

1991

• First conference on ‘Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums’ chaired by David Bearman (Canadian) held in Pittsburgh, PA (USA) Bearman and Jennifer Trant (Canadian) founded Archives and Museum Informatics

1994

• Sonic Acts biennial festival, intersecting digital art, science and technology founded, Amsterdam (Netherlands) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

1990

• ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) international not-for-profit organization with annual festival and confidence founded in the Netherlands to ‘foster interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and technology’ (ongoing).
• Electronic Frontier Foundation founded in San Francisco as a non-profit digital rights group promoting internet civil liberties (USA).
• INM (Institute of New Media) founded, Frankfurt (Germany).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1991

• VNS Matrix Collective formed in Adelaide by Australians Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt published A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (Australia).

1993

• RTMark, an anti-corporate activist group, sponsored the Barbie Liberation Organization. As a protest against gender stereotypes, the voice boxes of Barbie and GI Joe dolls were swapped out, and the dolls were returned to the store for sale.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1992

• The term ‘metaverse’ first used in Neal Stephenson’s (American) science fiction novel Snow Crash.

1993

• The term ‘Afrofuturism’ coined by Mark Dery (American), for artists and writers addressing the African diaspora, and exploring possible Black futures.
• Neural, magazine of new media art founded by Alessandro Ludovico and Ivan Lusco (Italians).

1994

• King’s Cross Phone-in: Heath Bunting (British) used his cybercafe.org website to orchestrate a social participation project using the public phones in King’s Cross railway station, London (UK).
• The Vision Machine, by Paul Virilio (French), explored the production and dissemination of processed images, and their effect on visual perception.
• The ABC of Tactical Media, Geert Lovink (Dutch) and David Garcia (British) essay, Nettime mailing list.

Artworks

1992

• Interactive Plant Growing, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (French). An installation in which living plants form an interface between participants and the artwork. Artificially living plant organisms grow on screen in relation to participant interactions with the real plants. Sommerer and Mignonneau make interactive systems that equate to living ones.
• CyberSM, Stahle Stenslie (Norwegian): a bodysuit allowing visual, auditory and tactile bodily sensations to be transmitted over a network from one participant to another; participants remotely stimulate each other’s bodies, creating a new form of interaction. The system is anonymous; participants choose the gender and appearance of their digitized body.

1994

• Golden Calf, augmented reality, Jeffrey Shaw (Australian). Through a screen, a virtual sculpture is overlaid onto a pedestal in the physical gallery space.

Social & Political Context

1990

• Nelson Mandela, anti-Apartheid activist released (South Africa).
• Reunification of Germany.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified the environmental effects of man-made CO2 emissions.

1990–1991

• Gulf War: Iraq invaded Kuwait.

1991

• Rajiv Gandhi, Indian prime minister, assassinated.
• Yugoslav Wars (end 2001).
• Boris Yeltsin becomes first president of Russia.
• Civil War in Somalia (ongoing).

1991

• South Korea becomes democratic state and member of the UN.

1992

• Bosnian War between Bosnia and Herzegovina (until 1996).
• Six-day riots in Los Angeles over police brutality at the arrest of African American Rodney King (USA).

1993

• Bill Clinton inaugurated president of the United States.
• Waco siege, Texas (USA).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1990

• Tim Berners-Lee (British) implemented the first browser and web server, and the URL syntax, HTTP protocol at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland) leading to the World Wide Web.
• Hubble Space Telescope launched by NASA into low Earth orbit and with enhanced ability to capture clear images of space (USA).

1991

• Linux Kernel Operating System pioneered by Finnish Software Engineer Linus Torvalds (Finland).
• The first webcam developed, Cambridge University (UK).
• Adobe Photoshop 1.0 released.

1993

• First graphics web browsers: Mosaic (1993) and Netscape Navigator (1994) (USA).
• First smartphone, IBM Simon, developed by IBM.
• Alias Wavefront, high-end 3D graphics software company, was founded in Toronto, Canada (acquired by Autodesk in 2006).

1994

• Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos (USA).
• Home video game console PlayStation released (Japan).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

1995

• Dia Center, NYC, began commissioning artist web projects (USA) (ongoing).

1996

• Rhizome organized ‘Can You Digit’ exhibition at Postmasters Gallery, NYC (USA).
• Videomedeja video festival founded, Novi Sad (Serbia) (ongoing).

1997

• The Japan Media Arts Festival: annual festival honouring outstanding works in digital media, founded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Japan).
• International Image Festival (Festival Internacional de la Imagen): festival in design, art, science and technology founded in Manizales (Colombia) (ongoing).
• Onedotzero international festival, founded by Matt Hanson (British), London (Britain) (ongoing).
• CYNETART international biennial festival and competition created by Trans-Media-Akademie, Hellerau (Germany) (ongoing).
• ICHIM 1997 ‘Cultural Heritage Informatics’ conference held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, organized by Archives & Museum Informatics, Europe (France).
• Inaugural ‘Museums and the Web’ conference held in Los Angeles in 1997, convened by David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (Canadians) (USA).

1998

• Transmediale festival for art and digital culture founded, Berlin, by Hartmut Horst and video artist Micky Kwella (Germans) (Germany).
• ‘Infowar’, Ars Electronica festival theme, investigating the information society and computer-supported conflict. Linz (Austria).
• Alternative Party festival founded in Turku, organized by Alternative Party (Finland).
• Steve Dietz (American) co-curated the exhibition, ‘Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net’, on the occasion of the 1998 ‘Museums and the Web’ conference (online).

1999

• ‘net_condition’ exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe, exploring the social and technological conditions of the information society (Germany).
• ‘Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art’, game modifications as artworks, San Jose State (USA), curated by Anne Marie Schleiner (American).
• Elektra International Digital Art Festival founded, Montreal (Canada).

Organizations & Spaces

1995

• The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (USA) formed a coalition of 65 cultural organizations focused on coordinating digital networked project and cultural resources.

1996

• Rhizome online listserve founded by Mark Tribe (American).
• Opening of the Ars Electronica Center, Linz (Austria) (expanded in 1996).
• Turbulence.org founded to commission and support net art.
• Furtherfield founded by directors Mark Garrett and Ruth Catlow (British) in London, and became a gallery and online space for new media theory and practice with a focus on social change (Britain) (ongoing).
• C³: Centre for Culture and Communication, Soros Foundation, launched (Hungary) (ongoing).
• The Computer History Museum established, Mountain View, California (USA).

1997

• NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) run by NTT East Corp, Tokyo, founded, to facilitate a dialogue between science, technology and art, through exhibitions, workshops, performances, symposiums and publications (Japan) (ongoing).
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (USA), launched Gallery 9 online exhibition space, directed by Steve Dietz (American), which became a recognized online venue for presenting internet-based art (1997–2003).
• Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology founded. Montreal (Canada).
• Faces international online community established by Kathy Rae Huffman, Diana McCarty (Americans) and Valie Djordjevic (German) to connect women in new media art.
• The Institute for Electronic Arts, a high-tech research studio facility within the School of Art and Design, founded within New York State College of Ceramics (NYSCC), Alfred University, New York, emerging out of the first incorporation of video and electronic technologies in a fine art curriculum in the USA in 1969.

1998

• Rhizome.org launched, featuring artists engaged with digital technologies and the internet. Established Artbase (1999), an archive of net art works (ongoing).
• Eyebeam founded as a not-for-profit art and technology centre in NYC by John Seward Johnson III, David S. Johnson and Roderic R. Richardson (Americans). A centre for the research, development and curation of new media artworks (USA) (ongoing).
• Electrofringe not-for-profit community-based electronic arts and culture organization, founded by Nick Ritar and Sean Healy (Australians), based in Sydney (Australia) (ongoing).
• Museums Computer Group established as a non-profit association for individuals with a common interest in sharing best practices in the use of technology and digital platforms within the museum and heritage sector (Britain).

1999

• Archive of Digital Art (ADA) founded in Austria, to document the field of digital art, led by Oliver Grau (German) (ongoing).
• iMA space for art practices using new technologies, founded Brussels (Belgium) by Yves Bernard (Belgian).
• VIDA Art and Artificial Life Awards founded by Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (Spain) (until 2015).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

1995

• ‘Net art’ emerged as art made on and for the internet, as a social critique that used the web platform as distribution. Artists include Vuk Ćosić (Serbian), who coined the term ‘net.art’; Jodi.org (Dutch and Belgian), Olia Lialina (Russian), Alexei Shulgin (Russian) and Heath Bunting (English). Writers include Geert Lovink (Dutch), Pit Schultz (German), Tilman Bäumgartel (German) and Josephine Bosma (Dutch).
• Mongrel, a British-based collective that created activist internet art that confronted issues of race, class and identity. Members include Graham Harwood, Richard Pierre-Davis, Mervin Jarman (British) and Matsuko Yokokoji (Japanese) (until 2008).
• Nettime internet mailing list proposed by Geert Lovink (Dutch), and Pit Schultz (German). Moderated by Ted Byfield (American) and Felix Stalder (Swiss) (since 1998). Nettime has played an important role in disseminating critical discourse on internet art and culture (ongoing).

1996

• Alexei Shulgin (Russian) organized net.art per se, a gathering of artists involved in the movement, in Trieste (Italy).
• DigitalSpace Traveler 3D voice-chat digital community, with 3D chat rooms created by individual users (USA).

1997

• Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) founded by Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray (Americans) and Carmin Karasic (Dutch American), cyber-activists practising non-violent acts of defiance. EDT created FloodNet web tool (1998) DDoS attacks in support of Zapatista rebels, Chiapas (Mexico).

1999

• RTMark created a fake campaign website for presidential candidate, George Bush, gwbush.com.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

1996

• Bodies INCorporated, website, by Victoria Vesna (American): an online market for customizable avatar bodies.
• My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, internet art, Olia Lialina (Russian). A hypertext nonlinear storytelling, with a branching narrative. A groundbreaking internet-based cinematic montage.

1997

• Art of the Electronic Age, Frank Popper (Czech and French British) 1997. Popper surveyed the origins, practices and aesthetic purposes of technological art.
• Intelligent Agent Magazine: interactive media in arts and education edited by Christiane Paul (German American) and Patrick Lichty (American), published by Hyperactive Corporation (single issue magazine 1/1/1997).
• Heritage Gold, internet art by Mongrel (British). A hack of Adobe Photoshop with tools renamed for editing race and social status. A critique of racial discrimination and class hierarchy in British society.
• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative by Janet Murray (American) explored digital technology’s influence on the development of narrative. Murray analysed interactive cinema, hypertext fiction and the future of storytelling (updated edition: 2016).
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle (American) exploring the ‘impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines.’

1998

• Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud (French). Bourriaud articulated relational aesthetics as transformative contemporary art practices that emerge from human relations and social spaces.

1999

• Riot, by Mark Napier (American): browser art blending news/corporate websites into a media collage.
• The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin (American): an interactive web narrative based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges and presented as a sequence of ten video games, adapted from classics such as Pong and Space Invaders.
• Bindigirl, Prema Murthy (American): cyberfeminist internet artwork with a postcolonial perspective.

Artworks

1995

• HOOD2, generative art, William Latham (British), showing algorithms that generate artificial nature. Created at IBM Scientific Center, Winchester (UK).

1995

• Live Wire, Dangling String, Natalie Jeremijenko (Australian). An eight-foot plastic rope hanging from the ceiling was attached to a small electric motor, connected to an ethernet cable. The changing density of network traffic was visualized in the varied twitching movement of the string. Seen as an early example of Calm Technology. Jeremijenko is an artist/engineer who uses biochemistry, physics and neuroscience in her practice.
• Osmose, Charlotte Davies (Canadian): a virtual reality immersive environment where a headset and motion-tracking vest responded to the participant’s breathing and balance to move them through an immersive virtual world (also created Ephemère VR immersive environment, 1998).

1997

• Displaced Emperors, interactive installation incorporating relational architecture, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexican Canadian). Show at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (Austria), exploring colonial histories of Mexico and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• Galapagos, artificial life, Karl Sims (American). Visitors interactively evolved simulated animated forms. Installation exhibited at ICC Tokyo.
• Every Icon, John F. Simon, Jr (American). A conceptual software artwork where a grid can display every combination of black-and-white squares, unfolding over a massive time frame. John F. Simon, Jr created software and code-based generative art.

1998

• The Messenger, interactive art, Paul DeMarinis (American). Email messages received over the internet are displayed letter by letter on three alphabetic telegraph receivers. DeMarinis is a pioneer of sound art.
• Boundary Functions, Scott Snibbe (American). An interactive floor-projected artwork, visualizing the hidden boundaries between participants. Snibbe is one of the first artists to work with interactive projection.

Social & Political Context

1995

• World Trade Organization (WTO) founded to monitor the flow of trade across the World.
• Tokyo subway sarin attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult (Japan).
• Terrorist bombing of Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh (USA).
• Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli prime minister, assassinated after signing the Oslo Accords.

1997

• Tony Blair elected prime minister of Britain.
• Zaire becomes the Democratic Republic of the Congo after Kabila ousts Mobuto.
• Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, following the end of UK’s 99-year lease of the territory.
• Diana Princess of Wales killed in car crash in Paris (France).

1998

• Osama bin Laden issues a fatwa against the West.
• The Good Friday Agreement officially ends the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
• Omagh Bombing by dissident members of the IRA, who opposed the Good Friday Agreement (Northern Ireland, Britain).
• Hurricane Mitch kills over 11,000 in Central America, especially Honduras and Nicaragua.
• Impeachment of US president Bill Clinton begins over the Clinton–Lewinsky affair (USA).
• Continuing famine in North Korea.

1999

• The Euro issued, becoming common European currency in 2002.
• Columbine High School Massacre, Colorado, fifteen killed (USA).
• Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

1995

• Windows 95 launched (USA).
• Premier of Toy Story, the first film by Pixar and the first computer-animated feature film (USA).

1996

• Nintendo 64 video game console released (Japan).
• Dolly the sheep was the first successfully cloned mammal (UK).
• Japan released the DVD.

1997

• Internet Explorer was launched (USA).
• David Zicarelli obtained the publishing rights to Max – the visual programming language for music and multimedia (originally created by Miller Puckette in the 1980s) and founded Cycling 74. Max MSP was released in the same year. It has been used extensively to create compositions, performances, recordings and art installations. San Francisco, CA (USA).

1998

• Google founded by Larry Page and Surgey Brin (USA).
• Autodesk Maya (3D computer graphics) initial release. Silicon Graphics, Alias and Wavefront technologies merged into Maya. Became industry standard for film, television, games and commercials, Mill Valley, CA (USA).
• Unreal game engine, developed by Epic Games, first showcased. Used in video games and for virtual sets in film and TV series (such as the Mandalorian, Lucas films, 2019) Maryland (USA).
• Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and rapid prototyping developed.

1999

• The term Web 2.0 coined by Darcy DiNucci (American).
• Japanese cell phones became smart phones.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• FILE Electronic Language International Festival founded for dissemination of events and publications through Brazil and South America, with festival venues in in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre. Founded and organized by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto (Brazilians) (ongoing).
• MUTEK festival of electronic music and digital art, Montreal (Canada), founded by Alain Mongeau (Canadian) (ongoing).
• Media_City Seoul (became Seoul Media City Biennale) founded in Seoul (South Korea), to reflect experimental art and media in the city (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

• Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB): online resource for curators of new media art founded by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook (British), University of Sunderland (Britain).
• RIXC centre for new media culture established in Riga (Latvia).
• Web Net Museum (France) founded by Fred Forest (French Algerian) to support new media artists, works, experiments and events. Curator Louis-José Lestocart (French).
• Media Lab Madrid created by the Madrid City Council for research, production and dissemination of cultural works using digital technologies (Spain) (ongoing).
• Edith Russ Haus for Media Art established as an exhibition space for media art, City of Oldenburg (Germany) (ongoing).
• Digital Art Museum (DAM) founded by Wolf Lieser (German) as an online archive and resource on digital art and artists (ongoing).
• Beall Center for Art and Technology founded to support research, exhibitions and public programmes between the arts, sciences and engineering, UC Irvine, CA (USA) (ongoing).
• Art Center Nabi, Seoul (South Korea), founded to produce and exhibit digital art at the intersection of arts and technology, directed by SohYeong Roh (South Korean) (ongoing).
• Christiane Paul (German American) assumed role of Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC (USA). In her curatorial capacity, Paul would go on to curate the exhibition ‘Data Dynamics’ (2001), the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and establish artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to internet art.
• The Tate (UK) launched a curatorial initiative dedicated to net art with Graham Harwood’s (British) (Harwood @ Mongrel) ‘Uncomfortable Proximity’. This commissioning activity would become part of its Intermedia Art programme until 2011.

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• Etoy art group won a domain name battle for www.etoy.com with Etoy toy corporation (USA).
• The Yes Men founded (originated from RTMark) by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (Americans); culture jamming activism.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Lifesharing, 0100101110101101.org by Eva and Franco Mattes (Italian). The contents of the couple’s home computer was made fully accessible to the public, anticipating the blurring of private and public spaces that has occurred through social media and ubiquitous networked communications. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center (USA) (until 2003).

Artworks

• GFP Bunny, Eduardo Kac (Brazilian American): a transgenic artwork in which the artist used molecular biology to combine jellyfish and rabbit DNA, producing a bunny that glows green under blue light. Kac is known for transgenic art that integrates biotechnology and creates dialogue around its ethics and use.
• Autopoeisis, by Ken Rinaldo (American): a robotic sculpture installation with dangling arms that communicate with each other via a hardwired network and audible telephone tones, responding to human movement. Rinaldo is known for robotics and bio-art.

Social & Political Context

• January 1 widely celebrated as the first day of the New Millennium.
• Inter-Korean Summit between North and South Korea.
• Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria.
• Slobodan Milosevic overthrown as president of Yugoslavia.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Sony PlayStation 2 released in Japan to become the most popular video game console up to 2013.
• Expedition 1 puts three people on the International Space Station for 136 days (USA and Russia).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• ‘010101 Art in Technological Times’, SFMOMA, San Francisco, curated by Benjamin Weil (French), curator of media arts (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

• netzspannung.org platform for interactive art and media art education founded, Germany (ongoing).
• Bitforms Gallery, New York, founded, representing established, mid-career and emerging artists critically engaged with new technologies (USA) (ongoing).
• Whitney Museum, New York, launched artport, an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art, curated by Christiane Paul (German American) (USA).
• The Fake Factory founded by Stefano Fake (Italian) in Florence (Italy), to create immersive video art experiences (ongoing).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• The Landscape Initiative by C5 – information visualization of the landscape; projects involving mapping, navigation and GIS systems (Joel Slayton, Steve Durie, Geri Wittig, Jack Toolin, Brett Stalbaum, Bruce Gardner, Amul Goswamy (Americans) (USA).
• Paperrad.org, an artist collective with Jessica and Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones (Americans) and others, who created web-based and multimedia works with a nostalgic pop art/computer aesthetic (USA) (until 2008).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (Russian American) regarded as the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media.
• Blackness for Sale, Mendi and Keith Obadike (Americans): an e-commerce intervention, where Keith Obadike’s ‘Blackness’ was put up for auction on ebay.com in the ‘Black Americana’ category; a commentary on the online commodification of Blackness.
• Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (Americans), traces the origins of contemporary collaborations between scientists and artists, and highlights visionary writings about future technologies that came to pass.

Artworks

• Dialtones: A Telesymphony, Golan Levin (American): a concert performed through the dial tones of the audience’s mobile phones (at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria). Levin’s work explores the expressive use of computation.
• Every Shot Every Episode, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy (Americans): database video art where 10,000 shots from Starsky and Hutch TV show were re-categorized and presented on CDs that gallery viewers select and watch.

Social & Political Context

• George Bush inaugurated US president.
• Twin Towers attacked by Al Qaeda (11 September) (USA).
• USA and allies invade Afghanistan.
• Collapse of the Enron Corporation due to fraud and corruption (USA).
• Silvio Berlusconi, media magnate, elected prime minister of Italy.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• New media artists Casey Reas and Ben Fry (Americans) created the open-source programming language Processing, used globally by artists and designers, and by educators to teach the fundamentals of programming (USA).
• Wikipedia created by Jeremy Wales and Larry Sanger launched (USA).
• Google Earth released by Keyhole Inc., an interactive, 3D representation of Earth based on satellite imagery (USA).
• The first iPod is introduced by Steve Jobs (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Currents, annual international new media art festival, founded by Parallel Studios, Santa Fe, NM (USA) (ongoing).
• ‘Readme’ travelling media art festival focusing on software art, Moscow (Russia).
• Today’s Art international festival of art, music and technology founded by Olof van Winden (Dutch), The Hague (Netherlands) (ongoing).
• Biennale of Electronic Art, Perth (BEAP) founded by Paul Thomas (British Australian), Perth, Western Australia.

Organizations & Spaces

• The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art founded by Timothy Murray (American) to house international art produced on CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video, digital interfaces and the internet (USA).
• The Australian Centre for the Moving image (ACMI) is established in Melbourne as Australia’s national museum of screen culture.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• -empyre- soft_skinned_space: email listserv of monthly thematic discussions, originated by Melinda Rackham (Australian) (ongoing).
• Lynn Hershman Leeson (American) created ‘Agent Ruby’, an AI character that converses with online users on technology-related topics via a website, as an expansion on her 2002 film Teknolust. Themes Leeson explored cyborgs, human/technology hybrids and identity politics.
• Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau (German); contextualizes virtual art within the history of illusion and immersion in art.

Artworks

• Tracking Transience website by Hasan Elahi (Bangladeshi American) in which the artist documented every aspect of his life in digital images, in response to being mistakenly placed on the government’s terrorist watch list. His work examined issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration and borders.
• Super Mario Clouds, game-hack, Cory Arcangel (American): a modification of Nintendo game Super Mario Bros, with only the cloud graphics remaining.

Social & Political Context

• Founding of the International Criminal Court based at The Hague for prosecuting perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity (the Netherlands).
• Bali bombings, Indonesia. Terrorist attack, many killed and injured.
• Moscow theatre hostage crisis (Russia).
• SARS infection begins (China).
• Israel begins to build the West Bank barrier between it and the West Bank.
• America set up the Guantanamo Bay detention centre on their naval base in Cuba to detain terrorist suspects.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Web browser Firefox launched (USA).
• Elon Musk (South African) founded SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) to create more affordable rockets (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• DAM Projects, Berlin, founded the DAM Digital Art Award (Germany) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

• New Media Caucus (caucus of the College Art Association) founded as ‘an international non-profit association formed to promote the development and understanding of new media art’. College Art Association conference, NYC founders: Conrad Gleber, Gail Rubini, Doreen Maloney, Jim Jeffers and Heather Freeman (Americans) (ongoing).
• FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) new media arts centre, Liverpool, opened (UK) (ongoing).
• Rhizome became an affiliate of the New Museum, NYC, staging exhibitions, and maintaining its website and extensive archive of new media art projects, Artbase (USA) (ongoing).
• Upstream Gallery founded, Amsterdam (Netherlands), showing contemporary and digital art.

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• Runme.org collaborative and open project formed with Amy Alexander, Florian Cramer, Matthew Fuller, Olga Goriunova, Thomax Kaulmann, Alex McLean, Pit Schultz (German), Alexei Shulgin (Russian), the Yes Men (American), Hans Bernhard (Austrian) and Alessandro Ludovico (Italy), with a focus on software art.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, by Roy Ascott (British) ed. Edward Shanken (American). Ascott discussed how networked communication has shaped behaviour and consciousness within art.
• Digital Art, by Christiane Paul (German American): a broad survey of new media art.
• The New Media Reader, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Americans). Containing texts published from the Second World War to the emergence of the World Wide Web.

Artworks

• The Listening Post, data visualization installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen (Americans) installed at Whitney Museum of Art, New York (USA), displaying excerpts of online conversations in real time, on 231 text displays hanging in a grid formation, and using a text-to-speech program to sonify the excerpts (until 2005).

Social & Political Context

• America at war in Iraq (until 2011).
• Suicide bombing of Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, 12 killed (Indonesia).
• War in Darfur, Sudan, leading to ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs by Sudanese military and Janjaweed (until 2020).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Second Life, a multi-player online virtual world, released by Linden labs (USA).
• Space Shuttle Columbia crashed on re-entry; no survivors (USA).
• International Human Genome Project completed the mapping and sequencing of all the genes in the human genome, enabling the reading of the genetic blueprint for building a human being.
• Supersonic Aircraft Concorde retired after 27 years’ service (UK and France).
• NASA’s Exploration Rover robotic vehicles launched (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• The Influencers festival of guerrilla communication, graffiti, visual arts and film founded, Barcelona (Spain), curated by Bani Brusadin and Eva and Franco Mattes (Italians) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

• International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) founded by 15 universities, for educators, practitioners and scholars in digital media (ongoing).
• Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA) founded and directed by Rex Bruce (American) as a new media art gallery (USA) (ongoing).
• Media Art Net (Germany) created as a database of new media art (ongoing).
• The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) launched, supporting teaching and research in media arts.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Media N, international journal of the New Media Caucus founded, first editor-in-chief Rachel Clarke (British American) (ongoing).
• {Software} Structures, by Casey Reas (American): a website relating software art to the procedural drawings of Sol LeWitt. Reas creates software-generated dynamic and static art.
• Internet Art, by Rachel Greene (American): a survey of experimental artists using the internet to create new artistic forms.

Artworks

• Images for 18 Musicians, aka Process 4 (Performance 1), Casey Reas, custom software and gesture tablet. Software artist, Casey Reas is the co-founder of the Processing software language.

Social & Political Context

• Terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf attacked the Philippine-registered MV Superferry 14. The dead numbered 116, including children.
• Madrid train bombings. Over 2,000 injured (Spain).
• Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian National Authority, died.
• Earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Large region affected, most death at Banda Aceh (Indonesia).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• NASA’s Exploration Rover robotic vehicles Spirit and Opportunity began exploring the surface of Mars to determine if water and life forms had existed on the planet (until 2018) (USA).
• Facebook launched by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCallum, Chris Hughes (Americans) and Eduardo Saverin (Brazilian) Cambridge, MA (USA).
• Images seen of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Organizations & Spaces

• The Thing, a non-profit organization and website supporting new media culture, founded (ongoing).
• MEET Digital Culture Center, Milan founded (Italy).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• New Media in Art by Michael Rush (American): a survey of artists using digital technologies in their practice.

Artworks

• Putto, Michael Rees (American), combining a 3D animation and physical sculpture (collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA). Rees’s work combines physical and digital making in sculpture, 3D animation, installation, augmented reality and interactive computing.

Social & Political Context

• Mahmood Ahmadinejad made president of Iran.
• Hurricane Katrina caused devastation in and around New Orleans (USA).
• Angela Merkel became Germany’s first female chancellor.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Unity game engine released by Over the Edge Entertainment (Denmark), which later became Unity Technologies (USA). Originally designed for Mac OS platform; gradually extended to desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms.
• YouTube video sharing platform founded, San Bruno, California (USA).
• Dwarf planet Eris discovered by a Palomar Observatory team led by Mike Brown in San Diego, CA (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• ZER01 multidisciplinary, multi-venue new media art biennial event in San Jose, CA, founded. Curated by artistic director Steve Dietz (American) (USA) (ongoing).
• Microwave (formerly Videotage, 1996) became an independent, international new media art festival (Hong Kong) (ongoing).

Organizations & Spaces

• Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Inc. founded by Josette Melchor (Mexican American) and Peter Hirshber (American) San Francisco, CA. A not-for-profit organization promoting and supporting the intersection of art, technology and community (USA) (ongoing).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• Second Front founded (international); the first performance art group in Second Life with Gazira Babeli (Italian), Yael Gilks (UK), Bibbe Hansen (American) Doug Jarvis (Canadian) Scott Kildall (American),Patrick Lichty (American) Chicago, and Liz Solo (Canadian) (ongoing).
• Nasty Nets collaborative blog formed to share internet media artefacts. Popularized the term ‘Surf Club’. Contributors include Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan and Marisa Olson (Americans) (until 2012).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Art of the Digital Age, by Bruce Wands (American): a survey featuring artists working in net art, digital installation and virtual reality.
• PigeonBlog, Beatriz da Costa (German), Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto (Americans). Uses homing pigeons to collect data on air quality, San Jose, CA, ZER01 Festival.
• Video Art, Sylvia Martin (Australian) and Uta Grosenick (German).

Artworks

• Dead-in-Iraq, Joseph DeLappe (American). As a protest against the war in Iraq, and the use of online games as a recruitment tool, DeLappe used the online game America’s Army – created by the US Defense Department – to memorialize the name and date of death for every US service member who died in Iraq.
• Ear on Arm, Stelarc (Australia). The artist began a series of operations to have an ear grown from his stem cells, implanted on his arm, with an embedded miniature wireless microphone connected to the internet (ongoing).

Social & Political Context

• Mumbai train bombings killing at least 186 people (India).
• Saddam Hussein of Iraq executed by hanging.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Twitter is launched (USA), enabling users to send 140 character text messages.
• Nintendo launches the Wii (Japan).
• Tesla Motors, Inc. introduced the Roadster, lithium-ion battery cell electric car, the first all-electric car that could travel 245 miles (394 km) per charge (produced 2008–2012) (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• ‘Autonomous Agents’, a retrospective of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s (American) work held at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester (UK). Featured the Roberta Breitmore series (1974–1978) video works (1980s) and interactive installations.
• Domestic Tension, Wafaa Bilal (Iraqi American); as a protest against the Iraq War Bilal confined himself to FlatFile Galleries, Chicago, for a month. He could be seen remotely 24/7 via webcam; internet viewers could shoot at him with a remote-controlled paint gun (USA).
• ‘YOU_ser: The Century of the Consumer’ curated by Peter Weibel (Austrian German) at ZKM Karlsruhe (Germany). Artworks showed the emergence of Web 2.0.

Organizations & Spaces

• International Marketplace for Digital Art (MIAN), bringing together curators and digital producers to discuss digital art, founded, Montreal (Canada).
• LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijon (Spain) founded, as a centre for art, science and technology.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) by Electronic Disturbance Theater: a mobile phone application intended to guide migrants coming through deserts of the USA/Mexico border to water, delivering poetry to help them find water and safe routes. Due to risks to potential users, the project was never distributed (ongoing).

Artworks

• Abundance, Camille Utterback (American): a temporary public installation at the city hall plaza in San Jose, CA (USA) commissioned by ZER01 biennial. A dynamic animation was generated in response to movement of pedestrians in the plaza, projected onto a three-storey cylindrical rotunda. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement.

Social & Political Context

• Virginia Tech, mass shooting. Thirty killed by student Seung-Hoi Cho on two college sites in Virginia (USA).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Apple released the iPhone smart phone (USA).
• Tumblr social networking website founded by David Karp (American).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Clokenflap annual music and arts festival, founded by Jay Forster, Mike Hill (UK) and Justin Sweeting (Hong Kong) (ongoing).
• ‘Synthetic Times: Media Art China’, National Art Museum of China, held during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Featuring new media artworks by international artists (China).

Organizations & Spaces

• Streaming Museum launched as a public art experiment using creative digital technologies to produce exhibitions and present them on screens in public spaces internationally (ongoing).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• ‘Post-Internet’ term first coined by Marisa Olson (American) in an interview with Régine Debatty (Belgian) for We Make Money Not Art. Post-Internet artists include Harm van den Dorpel (German), Ed Fornieles (British), Amalia Ulman (Argentinian), Seth Price (Palestinian), Jon Rafman (Canadian), Marisa Olson, Artie Vierkant, Cory Arcangel, AIDS 3D, Petra Cortright and Ryan Trecartin (Americans).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Spirit Surfing, surf club (group blog with a focus in internet culture), co-founded by Kev Bewersdorf and Paul Slocum (Americans).
• Nine Eyes of Google Street View, by John Rafman (Canadian): a collection of Google Street Views, reframed as a form of photographic social documentary. Rafman’s screenshot selections reinserted meaning into Google Earth's indifferent imagery, while questioning how the images created through automated capture on a massive scale could be culturally understood (ongoing).

Artworks

• Virtual Jihadi, Wafaa Bilal (Iraqi American), created as a critique of the first-person shooter game Quest for Saddam. Bilaal hacked the Al Qaeda version of the game, Quest for Bush. Bilal’s version revealed the negative stereotyping of Arab Culture in the original game. Bilal’s work brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes a healing process through education and participation.

Social & Political Context

• Dmitri Medvedev became president of Russia.
• Nov Lashkar e Taiba, a terrorist group from Pakistan, carried out a series of attacks on Mumbai (India).
• Great Recession affecting stock markets across the world.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Google released Android smart phone (USA).
• Web browser Google Chrome launched (USA).
• Large Hadron Collider, developed by CERN, Geneva to aid the study of the subatomic world (Switzerland).
• Meow Wolf American arts and entertainment company started creating large-scale immersive art installations, co-founded by Sean Di Ianni, Matt King, Corvas Brinkerhoff, Emily Montoya, Caity Kennedy, Benji Geary and Vince Kadlubek, in Santa Fe, NM (USA) (ongoing).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• The Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival is launched in partnership with leading digital arts organizations working across the northwest of England (UK).

Organizations & Spaces

• WORM experimental new media art centre, founded, Rotterdam (Netherlands).
• African Digital Art Network, digital platform and archive founded by Jepchumba (Kenya) (ongoing).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• R-U-IN?S / Garden Club, by Kai Altmann (American): collaborative projects consisting of visual memes circulated on Tumblr, altered by other users and reincorporated by Altmann, reflecting a global, post-internet aesthetic. Garden Club initiated two years later (ongoing).
• Art and Electronic Media (Themes and Movements) by Edward A. Shanken (American): a thematic survey addressing the relationship between art and new technology, featuring over 200 artists from over thirty countries.
• New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana (Americans) explores the technologies, thematic content and conceptual strategies of new media art.

Artworks

• Flying Eyeballs, Alan Rath (American), with aluminium, fibreglass, G‑10, PVC, ABS, custom electronics, CRTs. Alan Rath was a pioneer in electronic, kinetic and robotic sculpture.
• My Ghost: My London, Jeremy Wood (British), GPS drawing. Using his body as a geodesic pencil moving through space and time, Wood draws with satellite navigation technology and video.

Social & Political Context

• Barack Obama inaugurated as first Black president of the USA.
• Swine flu H1N1 virus pandemic first appeared in USA (until 2010).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Launch of the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
• Avatar released. Directed by James Cameron (Canadian), it used groundbreaking motion-capture techniques and computer-generated characters, and was released for both traditional and 3D viewing.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• First Balance-Unbalance festival, Buenos Aires (Argentina) – art exploring the intersection of nature, science, technology and society, founded by Ricardo Dal Farra (Argentinian) (ongoing).
• Galerie Charlot, Paris (France) founded by Valérie Hasson-Benillouche (French), with a focus on technology and science
• Rhizome launched ‘Seven on Seven’ annual conference, featuring artists and technologists (USA) (ongoing).
• The Artist Is Kinda Present, An Xiao Mina (American) The artist allowed participants at New York Performance Center to sit with her as she responded to text messages or tweets. The piece comments on the nature of social relationship in the age of mobile devices and social media (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

• Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory established to support new media art in Slovenia (ongoing).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook (British) (Leonardo Book Series) discusses how new media art has precipitated a redefinition of curatorial practices and the role of audiences.
• Museums in a Digital Age, edited by Ross Parry (UK), and published by Routledge.

Artworks

• Scattered Light, Jim Campbell (American), at Madison Square Park, NYC (USA). A video installation with custom electronics and 2,000 LEDs spanning the park. The LEDs were programmed to flicker, creating the illusion of figurative images crossing the park. Campbell is known for creating large-scale LED light works.

Social & Political Context

• Destructive earthquake in Haiti, 7.0 magnitude.
• Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on BP’s Macondo Prospect.
• Start of the Arab Spring, a series of protests across the Arab world.
• Julia Gillard (Australian) elected first woman president of Australia.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Burj Khalifa building in Dubai became the tallest structure on the world.
• The iPad launched by Apple (USA).
• Instagram social networking service launched by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, later bought by Facebook (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

• Borusan Contemporary Gallery and Art Collection founded by Ahmet Kocabıyık (Turkish), Borusan Holdings, featuring Turkish and international contemporary media-based art, Istanbul (Turkey) (ongoing).
• Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre designed by Daniel Libeskind (Polish American), which houses City University Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media, the Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media and the computer science, media and communication departments. Jeffrey Shaw (Australian) joined the university in 2009 as Chair Professor of Media Art and until 2015 was Dean of the School of Creative Media. Shaw is a pioneer of new media art, producing a wide range of immersive and interactive works.
• HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel (Switzerland) founded, ‘dedicated to digital culture and the new art forms of the Information Age’.

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• Manifest-AR, an international artists’ collective working with emergent forms of augmented reality as interventionist public art, founded by Sander Veenhof (Dutch), Mark Skwarek, Tamiko Thiel, Will Pappenheimer, John Craig Freeman, Christopher Manzione and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (Americans).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Bjork: Biophilia (Icelandic) for iPhone and iPad, developed in collaboration with Scott Snibbe (American): the first app-album with music and interactive artworks.
• Hyper Geography by Joe Hamilton (Australian): a Tumblr collage of hundreds of looping images sourced from blogs within the Tumblr network. The piece reveals the structure of the Tumblr environment. Hamilton’s work questions notions of the natural environment in a networked society.
• The Dump, 207 Hypotheses for Committing Art, by Maurice Benayoun (French Algerian): an applied research project where the act of artistic creation is revealed through Benayoun's unrealized digital works on The Dump blog (started in 2006).

Artworks

• A.Movi, Eelco Brand (Dutch), 3D continuous animation, portraying a simulation of nature that is ‘both an alienating and deeply human experience’ (TORCH gallery).

Social & Political Context

• Major earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.
• Meltdown of Fukushima nuclear reactor as major 9.0 earthquake strikes Japan.
• US Navy SEALS shot Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
• Occupy Wall Street protest movement in the Wall Street financial district of New York City (USA) (until 15 November 2011).
• Deposed leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi captured and killed.
• Kim Jong-un succeeded as leader of North Korea.
• The last of US troops withdrew from Iraq.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Zoom Video Communications, Inc. founded by Eric Yuan (USA).
• Snapchat, instant messaging App, launched (USA).
• The Danyang–Kunshan Bridge opens in China, the world’s longest viaduct at 164.8 km, to carry the Beijing–Shanghai High Speed Railway.
• NASA launches the Mars Science Laboratory Mission carrying the ‘Curiosity’ Space Rover to survey the Gale Crater on Mars.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Resonate annual festival for art and digital culture in Belgrade founded (Serbia).
• Lumen Prize launched as a global competition to celebrate best art created with technology, founded by Carla Rapoport (Wales).
• Expansion of Museums and the Web (MuseWeb) programming under the direction of Nancy Proctor and Rich Cherry (Americans) saw meetings in Asia, Europe and Australia and the launch of MWX exhibition initiative curated by Vince Dziekan (Australian).
• The International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN), presented by Elektra, Montreal (Canada) founded, director Alain Thibault (Canadian).

Organizations & Spaces

• Boston Cyberarts Gallery (USA) founded to foster the development of new practices in contemporary art making, organized by Boston Cyberarts, Inc., directed by George Fifield (Americans) (ongoing).
• Signal Culture residency founded by Jason and Debora Bernagozzi and Hank Rudolph (Americans) to create an environment for new media artists, toolmakers, curators and critics to interact and make new work (USA) (ongoing).
• Lumen Art Projects, founded by Carla Rapoport (American British), and directed by Carla Rapoport and Jack Addis (British). A not-for-profit which runs the Lumen Prize, and provides related exhibitions, commissions and events internationally (UK).
• HOLO editorial and curatorial platform founded, Toronto (Canada).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• After Art, by David Joselit (American). Joselit described art and architecture that embody networked structures in their process and form.
• Occupy Wall Screens by Maurice Benayoun (French Algerian): video screen juxtaposing in real time the stock price readouts next to emotional maps of Occupy Wall Street sites around the world. Shown at Big Screen Plaza in New York City and at StreamingMuseum.org.

Artworks

• Us Dead Talk Love, Ed Atkins (British): two-channel cinematic CGI video with poetic text, portraying hyperreal scenes, and synthetic characters in unsettling situations (collection Museum of Modern Art, NYC, USA). Atkins’ work is influenced by Structuralist film.

Social & Political Context

• Seventeen-year-old unarmed youth Trayvon Martin shot in Florida by George Zimmerman, who pleads self-defence and is acquitted to widespread protests (USA).
• Vladimir Putin elected president of Russia for the third time.
• Malala Yousafzai shot on a bus by Taliban extremists in Pakistan for her advocacy for women’s rights.
• Hurricane Sandy devastated Atlantic coastal areas from the Caribbean to Canada.
• Xi Jinping elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in China.
• Mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School (USA).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• A subatomic particle showed the expected properties of a Higgs Boson during experiments at CERN using the large Hadron Collider (Switzerland).

Organizations & Spaces

• Transfer Gallery founded by Kelani Nicole (American) Brooklyn, NYC, to support and show the work of artists making experimental media art, with a focus (since 2016) on work by women (USA) (ongoing).
• Arebyte Gallery, London, established to support the development of artists working across digital and emerging art forms in Britain.
• DiModa, dedicated to exhibiting VR artworks founded by Alfredo Salazar-Caro (Mexican) and William Robertson (American).
• Arshake platform for art and technology founded, Rome (Italy).
• Chronus Art Center, not-for-profit art centre, Shanghai, China, dedicated to new media art, founded by Dillion Zhang, Li Zuenhua and Hu Jieming (Chinese).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• AGNES, by Cécile B. Evans (Belgian American): a benevolent spambot that lived on the website of the Serpentine Gallery, London, and interacted with visitors in an esoteric way, highlighting the emerging role of AI in human–computer interactions (UK) (until 2014).
• www.ifnoyes.com: Rafaël Rozendaal (Dutch Brazilian) sold his website at an auction at Phillips, NYC. Rozendaal is known as the first artist to sell websites as art objects.

Artworks

• The Sound of Earth, Yuri Suzuki (Japanese), sound sculpture. Each country on the globe-shaped disc is engraved with a different sound collected from that part of the world. As the needle passes over, the piece plays the field recordings. Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician based in London (UK).

Social & Political Context

• Barack Obama sworn in for his second term as US president.
• Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela.
• Boston Marathon bombing. Three dead, many injured (USA).
• Clothing manufacturing factory Rana Plaza in Dhaka collapsed killing 1,134 workers, mainly women (Bangladesh).
• President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt deposed by a military coup.
• Terrorist attack on the Westgate Shopping mall, Nairobi (Kenya).
• Ceremonial funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
• Ebola epidemic in West Africa (until 2016).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival founded, Johannesburg (South Africa) (ongoing).
• #NarrarElFuturo digital festival founded, Bogotá (Colombia) (ongoing).
• Unpainted Munich, the first German fair dedicated to media art – including international galleries supporting artists using the technologies of their time (Germany).
• Digital Revolution, curated by Conrad Bodman (UK), Barbican London (UK), exploring art and technology since the 1970s.

Organizations & Spaces

• BOM arts organization founded, Birmingham (UK) to foster community experiences of new technologies, bringing together artists, scientists, technologists, universities and community organizations (ongoing).
• Thoma Foundation founded by Carl and Marilynn Thoma (Americans) with a primary focus in collecting digital art. Located in Chicago, IL and Santa Fe, NM (USA) (ongoing).
• NRW Forum Dusseldorf (Germany) established as an international cultural centre showing digital art.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito (Americans), dedicated to new media art conservation.

Artworks

• Alice Walking, Claudia Hart in collaboration with composer Edmund Campion (Americans): a sculptural opera and fashion show with augmented reality fabrics as wearable sculpture, real-time interactive music and live performers with tablets. Hart is a feminist artist who embraces emerging technologies, while drawing from art-historical canons. She works with animation, experimental theatre, AR and VR.
• Reifying Desire 6, by Jacolby Satterwhite (American): a 3D animation and live-action video. Influenced by music videos, social media and video games, Satterwhite’s fantastical 3D worlds are realms of imagination and sexual desire (collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (USA)).

Social & Political Context

• Russia annexed Crimea.
• Narendra Modi became prime minister of India.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• The Lander Module Philae made the first landing on a comet from Space Probe Rosetta. Built by the European Space Agency.
• Generative adversarial network (GAN) learning framework for approaching AI developed by Ian Goodfellow (American).
• Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash (Americans) co-created Monegraph – a blockchain-based system for verifying original digital artworks – which was the first implementation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) (USA).
• The term ‘Web3’ coined by Gavin Wood (British), referring to online decentralization, and adoption of blockchain technologies.
• Facebook purchases Oculus VR (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Addis Video Art Festival founded by Ezra Wube (Ethiopian) to create a platform for innovative video art in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) (ongoing).
• Gray Area Festival, the first annual International media arts festival/conference in San Francisco, CA (USA) (ongoing).
• Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) – annual media festival showcasing narrative forms using immersive technology founded by Keram Malicki-Sanchez, with Joseph Ellsworth (Canadians) Toronto (Canada).
• ‘NEAT: New Experiments in Art and Technology’, curated by Renny Pritikin (American) Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (USA).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places, by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Americans). Features media art projects where contemporary global conditions are foregrounded.

Artworks

• Factory of the Sun, Hito Steyerl (German): an immersive video installation, telling a story of workers whose forced dance moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. Inspired by a quote from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), describing machines as ‘made of pure sunlight’. Steyerl’s work explores media, technology and the global circulation of images.
• Material Speculation: ISIS, Morehshin Allahyari (Iranian). The artist reproduced 3D replicas of statues destroyed by ISIS. After releasing the files of one model for download, Allahyari decided not to release the others, with a plan to place them with an institution in the Middle East, to avoid a perpetuation of Western cultural power dynamics through ‘digital colonialism’.

Social & Political Context

• Syrian conflict escalated as Russia intervened for the government, leading to a refugee crisis.
• Restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and USA.
• China ended the 35-year one-child policy.
• Paris Summit Agreement of 196 nations at COP21 to reduce emissions and cut greenhouse gasses.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) first appeared.
• AltspaceVR social VR platform launched (purchased by Microsoft, 2017), a social platform where users generate spaces that others can visit to talk and collaborate in groups (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Cairotronica, biennial Electronic and New Media Arts Festival in Cairo (Egypt) founded by Haytham Nawar (Egyptian) (ongoing).
• MA/IN festival and prize in electroacoustic music and digital art founded, Matera, Potenza and Lecce (Italy) (ongoing).
• Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK) presented ‘Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet 2016–1966’ (curated by Omar Kholeif (Egyptian)).

Organizations & Spaces

• Panke Gallery founded, Berlin (Germany), focusing on digital and net-based art/culture.
• Roehrs & Boetsch gallery, Zurich (Switzerland) founded, exploring ‘digitalisation and its implications for society’.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• A Companion to Digital Art, by Christiane Paul (German American).
• Spectacle, Speculation, Spam: one of several video essays by Alan Wharburton (British), reflecting on the critical potential of CGI.

Artworks

• Watch the Sky, Will Pappenheimer, an augmented reality pioneer and Zachary Brady (Americans). A location-based augmented reality artwork in Marcus Garvey Park, NYC (USA). A re-envisioning of the Harlem Watchtower, with a virtual skywriting app allowing participants to write messages in the sky.
• #PAYBLACKTiME, RaFia Santana (American): a project where white people would send money to the artist using existing social media/app services (Facebook, PayPal), who would then order food for People of Colour using online meal delivery services. The project turns online capitalist platforms into a system of reparations for People of Colour (ongoing).

Social & Political Context

• Britain voted to leave the European Union.
• Rodrigo Duterte elected president of the Philippines. Began a violent anti-drug campaign.
• Military coup in Turkey against President Erdogan failed.
• Donald Trump won United States presidential election against Hillary Clinton.
• Death of Fidel Castro, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Pokémon Go, the first augmented reality mobile game, is released and becomes an instant success (USA).
• Oculus Rift VR headsets released
• Gotthard Base Railway Tunnel, the world’s longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel, was built through the Alps (Switzerland).
• Nintendo launched its hybrid game console Nintendo Switch (Japan).

Organizations & Spaces

• Kate Vass Galerie founded, Zurich (Switzerland), exhibiting work by artists engaged with new technologies.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle (American): a critique of the impact social media on human relationships.

Artworks

• The Alien Present, Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy (British): an interactive sculpture driven by quantum random walk data from a quantum computer simulation built by Rose Leahy, Robert Walker and collaborators, Sam Morley-Short and Jeremy Adcock (British), at the Center for Quantum Photonics (CQP) in Bristol (UK).
• Machine Garden, by Amy Youngs and Ken Rinaldo (Americans): an ecosystem artwork with organic and living organisms, electronics and man-made materials. Created at the University of Maine’s Innovation, Media Research and Commercialization Center (USA).
• A [for 100 cars], Ryoji Ikeda (Japanese). Visual and sound artist Ikeda used a device that generated frequencies and octaves in the pitch of A, to orchestrate the sound systems of 100 cars gathered in Los Angeles, CA, engaging the local community of drivers (for Red Bull Music Academy Festival, Los Angeles, USA). Ikeda’s work explores sound in raw states: sine waves, white noise, glitches and frequencies at the edge of human hearing.

Social & Political Context

• Donald Trump inaugurated as president of the United States.
• Emmanuel Macron elected president of France, defeating far-right Marine Le Pen.
• Despite evidence of global warming crisis President Trump announced USA withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.
• The G20 in Hamburg failed to reach a climate agreement.
• Far-right rally at Charlottesville, VA, against removal of Confederate statues. A car was driven into the crowd, 1 killed, other injured (USA).
• North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and other nuclear missiles. Sanctions imposed.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• ‘Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965–2018’, curated by Christiane Paul (German American), Whitney Museum, New York (USA).
• ‘Sites Unseen’, a mid-career survey of Trevor Paglen (American) held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, curated by John Jacob (American) (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

• PAX Annual Art Awards established to promote media practices of Swiss artists.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Art beyond Digital, by Dominique Moulon (French). Presents artworks produced in the decade prior to its publication. A dialogue to overcome the isolation of digital art from the field of contemporary art in general.
• Weather as Medium, Towards a Meteorological Art, by Janine Randerson (New Zealand): an exploration of artworks that use weather as the medium, engaging issues of the climate crisis.
• Art and Technology video series, on new media art and artists, sponsored by Bloomberg Media Studies and Hyundai (ongoing).

Artworks

• Orbital Reflector, Trevor Paglen (American): a sculpture was launched by SpaceX as the first art satellite object in space (in partnership with the Nevada Art Museum, Reno, NV, USA). Paglen’s work explores the space industry, classified secrets and global surveillance.
• Melting Memories, Refik Anadol (Turkish-American), custom software. Anadol’s body of work addresses the challenges and the possibilities of ubiquitous computing and AI.

Social & Political Context

• China removed time limits on presidential office; Xi Jinping could be president for life.
• Vladimir Putin won new six-year term as president of Russia.
• Cambridge Analytica data mining, and sale of data scandal. Facebook implicated and Mark Zuckerberg faced an enquiry.
• The ‘Me Too’ movement for women’s rights sues Harvey Weinstein on assault charges (USA).
• Women in Saudi Arabia allowed to drive following their ‘Women to Drive’ campaign.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, its first mission to the Sun and its outermost atmosphere, the Corona.
• Nifty Gateway marketplace for non-fungible token art (NFTs) founded by Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster (USA).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Media Art Globale (MAG) art, technology and science biennial festival founded, Jakarta (Indonesia), curated by Mona Liem (Indonesian) (ongoing).
• ‘A Formal Language’, Bitforms gallery, 50-year retrospective of Manfred Mohr’s (German) work as a pioneer in the digital art field, New York (USA).
• ‘The Body Electric’, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, CA (USA) – exhibition exploring the ways technology has changed understandings of the body.
• Ethnographies of a Homespun Spineless Cult and Other Neighbourly Relations – intervention by artist duo Nabbteeri (Finnish) in group show, ‘Weather Report: Forecasting Future’, addressing issues of climate change and shrinking biodiversity, Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale (Italy).

Movements, Groups & Collectives

• Biofriction research project, platform and artist group launched in Europe at the intersection of art, science and technology, with a focus on marginalization and exclusion. Researchers explored bio-art, biohacking, transhackfeminism, self-exploration and transgender themes (until 2021).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• A Biography of the Pixel, by Alvy Ray Smith (American). Smith contends that the pixel is the unifying technology of contemporary media.
• The Black Movement Project, by LaJuné Macmillan (American): a database of motion capture data from Black character models: ‘BMP is a tool for activists, performers & artists to create diverse XR projects, a space to research how and why we move, and an archive of Black existence’, LaJuné Macmillan.

Artworks

• Palo Alto (VR), Banz and Bowinkel (Germans): the artists blur the separation of virtual and real, presenting the VR world as a counterpart to the real, and challenging the viewer’s notion of an authentic reality.
• Can’t Help Myself, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (Chinese): an industrial robot repeatedly sweeps red blood-like liquid around the gallery floor, splattering the glass walls of its enclosure, shown at the Venice Biennale (Italy).
• Compost Series, Lauren Moffatt (Australian) AR/VR/video/photography; the artist used photogrammetry and machine errors in image capture to deconstruct representations of plants, then reconstruct the results into strange, organic, flower-like forms.

Social & Political Context

• Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand. Two mosques attacked by white supremacist Benton Harrison; 51 dead.
• Fire destroyed the roof and main spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (France).
• Impeachment of President Donald Trump by the House of Representatives for abuse of power.
• United States Space Force (USSF) announced by Vice-President Mike Pence, the world’s only independent military space force.
• Worst wildfires in Australian history caused a megafire.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• China National Space Station’s Chang’e 4 landed on the far side of the Moon.
• Event Horizon Telescope’s network of telescopes took the first image of a black hole (in the Galaxy Messier 87).
• The first all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station achieved by Jessica Mar and Christina Koch.
• NightCafe Studio AI art generator founded by Angus Russell, Sydney (Australia).

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Biotechnology and the Posthuman, artist seminar at Goldsmith’s College, London (UK) featuring Christian Mioclair (German), Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy, and Nicola Schauerman (British).
• Acute Art AR platform (UK) published works by 9 notable contemporary artists. The platform acts as a technical partner, translating the artists’ work into AR for the platform, directed and curated by Daniel Birnbaum (Swedish).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Making Art Work. How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture by W. Patrick McCray (American). Explores the flourishing of collaborations between artists, technologists and scientists during the post-Second World War period in America.

Artworks

• TX1, Adriana Knouff (American): elements of the artist’s hormone replacement medications were launched into space, marking the first-known representation of transgender experience in Earth’s orbit. Created as part of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative (USA).
• Omni, Ai Weiwei (Chinese): a virtual reality video (produced with Acute Art) fused two narratives of displacement – captive elephants in Myanmar, and refugees in Bangladesh.
• Liberty Bell, Nancy Baker Cahill (American): an augmented reality public art project, geolocated in different cities during the US election year.

Social & Political Context

• WHO warned of a serious coronavirus spreading from China across the world.
• China tightens control over Hong Kong, giving the National People’s Congress power to curtail civil liberties.
• Britain officially left the EU.
• Donald Trump was acquitted by the US Senate at his impeachment hearing.
• Series of lockdowns in countries all over the world due to coronavirus.
• Protests across the world in 2020 in support of ‘Black Lives Matter’ fighting for racial justice after George Floyd was killed by police on 25 May 2020, Minneapolis, MN (USA).
• Massive wildfires spread across California and Washington State (USA).

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Accelerated research into producing effective vaccines against COVID-19 in many countries with the UK, USA, China and Russia leading the way.
• NASA launched Space Rover Perseverance to Mars, with its small robotic helicopter Ingenuity to test power-controlled flight on another planet.
• Zoom cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform, used for video communications, messaging, voice calls and conference rooms, became a ubiquitous form of remote communication globally during the COVID pandemic.
• Meta Quest 2 stand-alone virtual reality headset released by Facebook Reality Labs (formerly Oculus)
• China Launched Chang’e 5, which brought back samples from the Moon.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale landmark auction at Sotheby’s. Fetching $17.1 million in sales, with 70% new buyers and bidders from North America, South America, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Quantum by Kevin McCoy (American) considered to be the first-ever NFT, sold for $1.47.
• ‘Proof of Art’, curated by Jesse Damiani (American) for Arts Electronica 21. The world’s first museum exhibition on the history of NFTs and digital art. At Francisco Carolinum, Linz (Austria), and concurrently on view online in Cryptovoxels (a blockchain-based virtual world).
• ‘Spatial Affairs: Worlding’, ZKM Kalrsruhe (Germany), and Ludwig Museum Budapest (Hungary) – a multi-user virtual online exhibition exploring virtual ecosystems (until 2023).
• Monumental Perspectives, AR site-specific project organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art and with Snap Inc., featuring local artists Ruben Ochoa, Glenn Kaino, Mercedes Dorame, I. R. Bach and Ada Pinkston (Americans) (USA) (ongoing).
• ‘Crip*’, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (USA), referencing Crip Theory, the exhibition featured artists addressing disability and non-normative identity.

Organizations & Spaces

• SPARKS launched by SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee (DAC) to host short presentations of new media artworks and research.

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• A Feminist Manifesta of the Blockchain, by Claudia Hart (American). Written as part of an artwork created for Casey Reas’s Feral File NFT platform.
• ‘Augmented Dreams’, article by Samantha Culp, in Art in America, documenting the expansion of augmented reality art practices.

Artworks

• Information films on Political Education, Achim Mohné (German): a video series using data from Google Earth to show industrial sites that cause or show evidence of climate change. In his work, Mohné experimented with contemporary media, photography and video to engage in a socio-critical discourse.
• The Pedestal Project by Color of Change (a national online racial justice organization, USA). Using an AR app, users could place virtual statues of racial justice leaders John Lewis, Alicia Garza and Chelsea Miller onto empty pedestals where recently removed confederate statues once stood. Envisioned by artist Spencer Evans (American).
• FOMO, Liat Segal (Israeli): a cluster of autonomous robots that broadcast their ongoing status, and react to the actions of neighbouring robots, exploring the ‘fear of missing out’ and obsession to stay connected in the digital age.
• Beyond Money #1, Moises Sanabria (Venezuelan): machine learning model trained on international bank notes, creating a pixel fusion of currency that can no longer be trusted.

Social & Political Context

• US Capitol invaded by a Trump-supporting mob.
• Joe Biden inaugurated president of USA, with Kamala Harris the first Black/Asian woman as vice-president.
• Coronavirus pandemic continues as new variants appear. Severe illness and deaths reduced by ongoing vaccination programmes.
• Military coup d’etat in Myanmar, ousting the democratically elected NLD Party.
• Russian state amassing military equipment and troops on the Ukraine border.
• Prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu voted out of office.
• President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, assassinated.
• Whistleblower Frances Haugen (former Facebook employee) leaked Facebook internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission revealing issues with how Facebook handles political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, ethnic violence and communications with investors.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• Nifty Gateway NFT platform began a partnership with the auction house Sotheby’s.
• 25 February–11 March: The First 5000 Days NFT artwork by Beeple sold at a Christie's Auction for $69.3 million. The first time an NFT was offered for sale at an auction house.
• Galleries developed platforms for sale of digital art, with NFT as proof of ownership providing a viable distribution format for digital art
• Facebook, Inc. (USA) rebrands as Meta (Meta Platforms, Inc) with plans to build a metaverse that would integrate all of its platforms and services. A metaverse is a digital reality, combining virtual and augmented reality, social media, gaming, blockchain cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens.
• NASA launches the James Webb Space Telescope from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana. The largest optical telescope in space with enhanced infra-red resolution.
• Van Gogh Immersive Experiences: for-profit events virtual reality (VR) entertainment events in numerous international locations (ongoing).
• DALL-E image open AI image generator released by OpenAI, San Francisco (USA). A GPT-3 neural network trained to generate digital images from text prompts.

Events, Exhibitions & Festivals

• In ‘The Milk of Dreams’ exhibition at the Venice Biennale, an exhibition gallery was dedicated to showing Vera Molnár’s (Hungarian French) pioneering work in the digital art field, at Giardini Arsenale, Venice (Italy). Curated by Francesca Franco (Italian).
• ‘Diverse Realities’, retrospective show by AR/VR pioneer Tamiko Thiel (American), Kuntsverein Wolfsburg (Germany).
• UNVIRTUAL NFT META ARTFAIR, virtual and physical NFT art fair, Paris (France).
• Ravon Chavon, Navajo experimental noise and visual artist, exhibited Zitkála-Šá (2018), Three Songs (2021) and Silent Choir (captured at Standing Rock Reservation, during the ten-month No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance in 2016–2017) at the Whitney Biennial (USA).

Organizations & Spaces

• Feral File founded to explore new ways of exhibiting and collecting digital art, using the blockchain to record each edition and provenance. All editions of artwork on Feral File are Bitmark NFTs that combine the media with a property rights contract (ongoing).

Publications, Internet Sites & Platforms

• Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito (Americans). The authors examined the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, proposing a variable approach to preservation.
• No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race, guest edited by Megan Driscoll (American), Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus. The edition asked the question: How can artistic practice better elucidate the racialization of technology and the technologization of race?

Artworks

• Aurae, Sabrina Ratté (French Canadian): an immersive space combining videos, sculptures, prints, virtual reality and interactive works where the viewer experienced a world of contradictions – physical/real, utopia/dystopia, light/matter and nature/technology. Sounds by Roger Tellier-Craig (Canadian) and Andrea-Jane Cornell (American).
• Counterfeit Post, Jon Rafman (Canadian): video installation with narratives and imagery inspired by popular message boards, ‘visualized to uncanny effect’ (BerlinArtLink) using video, animation technologies and text-to-image AI.
• Garden in the Machine, Vibrant Landscapes, Colin Ives (American): an AI algorithm trained on video drone footage of landscapes generates unresolved, sequences of disrupted environments.

Social & Political Context

• Russia invaded Ukraine. Led to world recession, inflation and trade disruption. Gas power supplies to Europe at risk. Grain supplies from Ukraine were held at the ports, and food prices rose globally. Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO.
• Winter Olympics in Beijing (China).
• Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in the UK in response to the perceived failure of COP26 to encourage action on climate change and environmental protection.
• Former prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe assassinated.
• Boris Johnson resigned as Conservative Party leader (UK)
• WHO declared monkey pox to be ‘A public health emergency of international concern’.

Scientific & Technological Innovations

• The Joint European Torus Research Group made a significant breakthrough in producing 11 megawatts of power from nuclear fusion.
• Central African Republic adopted Bitcoin cryptocurrency, alongside El Salvador.
• ESO (Southern Observatory Team) announced discovery of micro novae, small stellar explosions.
• NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released first pictures of deep space, revealing a galaxy cluster 5 billion light years away.
• Midjourney open AI image generator released by Midjourney, San Francisco (USA), founded by David Holz.
• Chat GPT AI chatbot launched by OpenAI San Francisco (USA).