Thoughts on the future past of Media-Art

In an era where the flood of information moves faster than light, the present and the future of art rapidly becomes part of the past. Whereois in the 90s we talked about contemporary art referring to the art made exclusively in the 20^th century, nowadays contemporary art is defined by the cutting edge technology that is produced every day and is consumed by millions of people worldwide in an astonishing rate. The question that arises then, is in what grounds do we investigate this phenomenon? My thesis is that if we affiliate such art with science fiction literature and film and especially the case of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, we can then investigate their reference points and the principal themes that bonds them together and that can provide us with a more or less certain view of the future past of Media Art.

Cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk takes contemporary science at a level where society depends fully on it and thus, all cutting edge scientific fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, virtual and augmentated realities, real time interaction, GPS navigation, artificial intelligence, role-playing games, play a very important role in society. They define people' s social status, corporations and religions have the power to create or destroy whole countries, an image not so different than the societies we already live in. So then, what is the role of art in such a world?

Technological excess has forced art into a new era. Nowadays all art is media-art, although not all art themes are new media related. The artist-individual finds himself floating in a fragmentated reality that can perceive, conceptualize and represent in numerous ways. The most important aspect of the media art representation is time. New media soon become obsolete and are substituted by newer media. Likewise, the new media art pieces have an ephemeral character, soon the will become museum pieces, frozen in a past time environment in order for them to be displayed.