Modern art, reflecting and defining new intellectual, scientific and technological developments, has radically extended the conventional media of sculpture and painting. Following innovative ideas about representation and the free use of materials in Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism — particularly in the work of Duchamp — artists abandoned strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of media and embraced any means, including technological, which best served their purposes. In the last 50 years especially, ideas about time and duration have reinstated narrative in art, via film-making and video, the theatricality of Happenings, Performance and Installation art, digitally manipulated photography and Virtual Reality. This pioneering book, originally published under the title New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, discusses the most influential artists internationally — from Eadweard Muybridge to Robert Rauschenberg, Bill Viola and Pipilotti Rist — and those seminal works which have radically transformed the map of world art.
