»Not Just Art« – From Media Art to Artware

In its standard usage, the term “media” is used for communication, information, or entertainment systems in their various forms and, until the later part of the 20th century, was mostly associated with broadcasting media — one-to-many distribution systems. Since the 1950s, the spectrum of “older” media — most notably print, radio, film, and television — was broadened with the advent of technologies such as color television, news satellites, video recorders and tapes, videophones, cable television, laser techniques, as well as computer and networking technologies. It is the latter two forms of media, in particular, that finally enabled a substantial shift to a many-to-many communication and distribution system that diminished the boundaries between sender and receiver or producer and consumer.