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hourly on the WWW. The WWW is now a repository of all the films, all the books, all the television programmes, all the art-works, all the comics, magazines, scientific and academic papers, - eve- rything we need to self-educate and adopt a life-long learning strategy for personal development. It’s the greatest self-learning tool ever invented - at a time when humanity most needs it.
The story of Expanded Photography after 1950 continues in my Expanded Media. Why? because the immediate 1940s preliminary innovations that affected and effectively recreated ALL media: - digital computers; the transistor, organised nationwide and regional networks (such as the Dowding air-defence system, 1939-1940); and later the experiments in multimedia, immersive en- vironments, the innovations of John Cage; Fluxus, the creation of Happenings; Electronic Music - both serious and Blues, Rock and Pop; - the development of audio-visual light shows, music festivals - the integration of Fine Art and Popular Art- the understanding of the gradual integra- tion of all the arts - George Maciunas of Fluxus called it Intermedia, the extension of the formal mono-media - poetry into Concrete Poetry, Music into Musee Concret, - the integration of many of the Arts into Television, innovations in Radio content, Text into Hypertext, Comics into Graphic Novels, Film into Avant Garde and Counter-Culture experimentalism, the Discotheque, the Juke- box, Simulation and Virtual Reality - all these were either already being developed or got under way in the 1950s and 1960s - even before the famous DARPA innovations that led to the Internet, personal computing, VR, e-mail, digital media and much more. As you can see, 21st century me- dia isn’t just about the technology - the digitalisation of our media - it is also about the innova- tions in Content, and the way in which Content is processed, delivered, exchanged and commer- cialised.
That’s why these recent developments and expansions of media are best handled in an integrat- ed, intermedia or transmedia envelope. Expanded Media will be the published soon.
Post-Face:
This ebook is part of a series being published by Dimbola Publishing - the publishing wing of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, based at the Dimbola Museum in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, UK. Other planned ebooks include an overview of the media arts: Expanded Media; and later, Ex- panded Movies, Expanded Graphics, etc. These publications are based upon research garnered for my mediainspiratorium app and website. Expanded Media will provide an overview of all the expansions of the media arts that are the back-story of our intricate, integrated and networked 21st century media ecosystem. This story of expanded photography ends with the beginnings of Digital Photography. After all our communications media became digital (over the period 1970-2010), so the partitions between different media become blurred and indistinct, and Ex- panded Media covers this, the impact of digital media... and highlights of the back-story - the intermedia history that has not yet been told - at least not as a multimedia (pictorial) essay...
Please use this ebook as a guide to your own self-learning, using the in-built links, or a search engine like Google to search-out artist’s names, and build your own history of new media, fo- cussed upon your favourite medium, be it graphics or games, psychohistory or convergent me- dia, illustration or animation. Use and enjoy this marvellous auto-educational learning tool while its still here!
I want to humbly thank all those artists and innovators whose work appears here - new histori- ographies are constantly revealing more of the remarkable back-story of our modern media, and in this ebook I wanted to give the reader an overview of them...Enjoy!
copyright notice
All the in-copyright images, sequences and clips featured here remain the property of their respective owners. They are used under section 10 of the UK 1998 Copyright Act - ie in the spirit of fair use, as a not for profit educational tool for stu- dents of all ages... I want to thank all those artists whose images and clips I have chosen to represent their important contributions to this back-story of our phenomenal 21st century media-space. Please contact me if you wish to withdraw or modify any items....bobcotton@mac.com.