Reaction to Remediation: Understanding New Media

Reaction to Remediation: Understanding New Media
Immediacy, Hypermediacy, Remediation
Jay David bolter and Richard Grusin

The start of this article was a bit frustrating honestly to someone who works in a media so far removed from computers and technology. I am getting my masters degree in ceramics…..basically I work with mud on a daily basis. Creating a three-dimensional work of art by means of a mathematical grid seems so abstract to me. Virtual art / virtual reality being the new media progressing in the near future is what the current culture is leaning towards. Talk of this reminds me of the film Star Wars when a hologram is used of princess Lea in order to communicate information to R2D2 and Luke Sky Walker she is in the round a sculpture created by a robot.
This summer I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts. A majority of the work was done either with a camera, computer, there was not a single painting, print of piece of pottery in the entire museum. Seems that the text and through my own experiences I am discovering that to be an artist in the 21sth century you must be technologically suave. but they due suggest that because of the old media ----new media can exist ---Microsoft’s Encarta would not exist if there had not been an original Encyclopedia.
It seems like it is not so much the artist that has changed but rather the viewer. In our society we need just like we discussed in the last class our need for constant stimulation we are being constantly fed with imagery, information in our daily lives, pose the question is photography making painting and painters unnecessary?
A window created by the masters mentioned in the text such as Durer with his wood cuts to the technique of tromped oil done by Vermeer, Da Vinci ----is this the same concept as our hyper-immediate window a computer screen makes as the user has multiple pages layered with accessible information easily available with the touch of a button. Would these artists been the computer geniuses of today?