With emerging technologies and tools comes new forms of art and expression. Modern exposure to art has become an increasingly digital experience, however, traditional media remains just as important. New and traditional media are both modes of expression, but exist in a inclusive and exclusive relationship with each other.
Both new and traditional media require vastly different fields of study. Understanding these different skills can take one many years to master on their own. Traditional media relies on one's understanding the nature of the mediums in which they work. Precise physical motions with a piece of charcoal or the delicate touch of a paintbrush on canvas are required to create fine works of art. New media users must understand the operating systems, software, input devices, file types, information transfer, display types, and operations of their equipment to develop the content they wish to share. It is not uncommon for artists to be able to mix these skills and take advantage of each medium.
New media allows for a variety of new ways to create art. However, unlike traditional media, new media relies on modern technologies to create content. Producing sound waves through electronic speakers, creating images on LCD screens, and altering computer files are just a few forms of new media that require electronic equipment to produce the art. Depending on what one is attempting to create, this equipment can cost you anywhere from five dollars to five thousand dollars in equipment alone. Traditional media consists of tools like paint, pencils, and canvas, which is typically a much more accessible and cheaper set of tools. Another advantage of traditional media is its freedom from an electrical charge, allowing it to exist almost anywhere it can be properly set up or displayed.
Media is meant to be experienced and new media excels in this field. The internet makes sharing and accessing new media incredibly easy. Downloading images and sound files directly to your personal computer to view them at leisure has made new media an incredibly popular form of expression. Traditional media is physically capable of being in only one location at once. Traditional media's best hope for exposure is to be viewed publicly or to be recorded and digitally shared to many others that don't have the opportunity to experience it first-hand.
While much overlap occurs in an artistic sense, techniques and the form that the expression exists in is much different. Traditional media skills fall into things like mixing paints to create the perfect hue and angle it perfectly on the brush in such a way it creates clouds in the warmth of a sunset or mountains with driven snow in a single stroke. These strokes of paint exist on a canvas like the rest of the tangible world. New media can take this very same image, reproduce it digitally, alter its colors, turn the image into digital sound, return the sound back into a visible image, and send this image across the world in a fraction of the time it took to even mix the paints. However, new media exists in the ethereal world of electronic waves, binary code, and digital representation.
Traditional and new media have many differences, but both are ways with which one can express themselves or an idea. Whether it be by a tube of phthalo paint or a vectorized graphic, both need an artist to make a statement.
