The main theme exposed in this article is articulated on the centrality that
the new media have assumed in the academic research of contemporary art theory. The
case studies analyzed derive from a direct knowledge of the experiments conducted
at the Comparative Media Studies, the Media Lab and the Program in Art, Culture,
and Technology (ACT) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the
state-of-the-art institutions on contemporary debate that sees new media and artistic
creativity relating in a single field of research. Some of the visual artists examined
here were members of the MIT community, contributing not only to the prestige of
the institution, but also to a paradigm shift in the method by which a work of art is
created, designed and perceived. Joan Jonas, New York artist and lecturer emeritus at
ACT, has conducted avant-garde visual experiments aimed at combining the relationship
between language and image, always using new performatic and digital aesthetics
with which to narrate her personal visions. The artists Krzysztof Wodiczko and Antoni
Muntadas, for over forty years at ACT have dedicated part of their research to the
analysis of the interrelation between technology, artistic languages and social communication.
Their artistic production stems from the use of new technologies that make it
possible to overlap between literary and visual codes, thus proposing an alternative to
the long tradition that separates the arts relegating them to autonomous practices.
