Spectator, Participant or Dupe?: (Re-)imagining the Audience through New Media and its Arts

Abstract

In this paper I discuss two competing sets of claims about new media art practice. The firstset celebrates and champions the new aesthetic possibilities afforded by digital technologies and argues that these enable new and ‘liberatory’ modes of spectatorship based on play, performance and participation. The second suggests that far from emancipating the spectator, new media art devalues genuine social interaction through an illusory participation in trivialised interactions. I conclude by suggesting that, given the increasing socio-cultural significanceof new media technologies, a dialectical synthesis of these positions is both desirable and possible.