Launched in 2005, this open-access, online journal provides a forum for scholars, artists, and practitioners to share their work and promote critical dialogue on new media art. The initial edition was created from papers of the New Media Caucus at the College Art Association (CAA) conference

Alexandra Provo

Danielle P. De Jager-Loftus

Humanities Commons

 ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews June 2023 ISSN: 2474-6673 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus Reviewed by: Danielle P. De Jager-Loftus, Associate Professor, Fine Arts Librarian University of South Dakota danielle.loftus@usd.edu Launched in 2005, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus is an open-access, online journal that provides a forum for scholars, artists, and practitioners to share their work and promote critical dialogue on new media art. In the inaugural issue, the editor stated that the aim of the journal was to “reflect the energy and interests of media arts practitioners, educators, and theorists...to act as a voice for new media arts in culture, education and practice”. The initial edition was created from papers of the New Media Caucus at the College Art Association (CAA) conference. The New Media Caucus is an affiliate society of the CAA. Once a year, Media-N continues to publish the select proceedings of the activities of the New Media Caucus from that year’s CAA conference.  Media-N is currently published using Open Journal Systems through the Open Publishing Network, an open-access digital publishing program from the Illinois University Library. The easy-to-use, well designed, and mobile-friendly website organizes content into categories and features. Each themed issue is guest-edited by artists, curators, scholars, or critics, and begins with an editorial statement, and includes a mix of scholarly articles, critical essays, artists’ projects, interviews and reviews. Content is shared under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license and most issues include high quality images to supplement and add value to the text. Previous archives from 2005 - 2016 can be accessed on the journal’s legacy WordPress platform.  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.  An example of the Media-N homepage from Vol. 19 No. 1 (2023): “The Afterlives of Data”. Each issue of Media-N has a dedicated section for feature essays, which are scholarly and peer-reviewed. These articles are authoritative original research, written by experts in the field. However, the most captivating sections take the form of interviews, artist statements, and experimental projects, and are the highlight of the publication. Instead of simply discussing content, the feature articles in these sections activate the material being shared and the artwork they originate from. It is in these features that the diversity and freshness of the journal comes alive, despite the fact that contributions are only available in PDF form. For example, in the Experimental Projects section of volume 1 of the 2021 issue about Borgesian multiplicity and remix is the captivating article “The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence” by Amerika, Kim, and Gallagher.  Seventy-two pages in this contribution are beautifully designed as works of art in their own right and are a joy to experience. However, page 74 shows a video still with an icon at the top right of the page that implies sound. Media-N is a new media journal; therefore, one might expect that it would be possible to experience the video and sound using new media technologies.  Making use of interactive web technologies would facilitate navigation, and would allow the use of social media, as well as citation tools. The journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is an example of a publication that makes use of these functions. When experiencing Kairos, the viewer is able to quickly look at the left navigation to decide what to peruse. Additionally, there is interactive video functionality in articles that discuss video, and the ability to share an article via Twitter. However, for those that are concerned with archives and preservation, the use of Open Journal Systems and support of a library go a long way to ensure the long-term preservation of Media-N.  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.  Image of “The Robot Does Not Exist” video still, Volume 17, no. 1, page 74, 2021. Media-N is a thoughtfully designed and engaging journal that has the potential to advance the ways in which new media can educate viewers and promote diversity of thought in the digital age. As a whole, the interviews, artist statements, and experimental projects articles are the most successful element of Media-N – fully highlighting the diversity of contributors, topics, and ideas that the journal champions. Media-N is not a journal recommended for just scholarly research. However, the platform seems to be well suited for academic and teaching environments hoping to expose students of new media to a network of open access content in an approachable way. It will be interesting to see how Media-N continues to mature, and this suggests that the journal should remain on the radar of the information professional, or anyone interested in visual resources. 

Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus

https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/hc:55778/CONTENT/dejager-loftus_median_mtr_june2023_final.pdf/

Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Humanities Commons