On August 25, 2015 CYLAND MediaArtLab hosted presentation by professor Marcelo Terreni on nonlinear languages at the White Hall of the Taiga Space in St. Petersburg. With its course of lectures and workshops on art and technology CYLAND MediArtLab provides an educational platform to share thoughts and gain experience from artists, critics, curators, coders, engineers and media activists. This platform had already proven the need and desire in media arts education from general public. CYLAND educational events provide reach discussions on possibilities of art and technology integration.
Marcelo Terreni is a professor, writer and videomaker from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Educated in multimedia technology, he has worked as a web and multimedia developer for public and private companies since 1999.
The presentation traced back on early examples of artists who surpassed the difficulties that traditional formats in literature, cinema or music imposed on their nonlinear aesthetic ambitions. Afterwards, it studied some language strategies in video art, photomontage, hypertext, experimental film or video games that found their way into nonlinear new media art.
Bibliographical references and reverse engineering commentary were given for most of the works included in this lecture, in order to provide a better understanding of the theoretical backgrounds and processes involved in creating media art.
Digital technologies allowed for a random, nonlinear access to any data stored in a computer’s memory. New media artists have enthusiastically adopted these possibilities to create a series of works that reassessed the ways we think art practice today and engendered a host of new genres and categories like generative art, algorithmic montage, interactive narratives or data visualization art. The advent of the Internet took this practices one step further by allowing new ways of distribution, connection and interaction.