Is it possible to invent (new) media otherwise, without falling back onto their pre-determined patterns, models and hierarchies? The philosopher Gilles Deleuze encourages us to go beyond the established schools that regulate the creative process in the arts and media, and to recapture the creative functions of the media themselves that transcend their ‘author-function’. For Deleuze, the key issue today ‘consists in reinventing – not simply for writing, but also for the cinema, the radio, the TV, and even for journalism – the creative or productive functions freed of this always reappearing author-function’. He sees these functions as moving beyond the constraints of the individual I. Proceeding ‘by intersections, crossings of line’, such creative functions assemble multiple enunciations, actions and affects, some of which may not even be human. What emerges as a result of this is ‘a living line’, which is always inevitably temporary and broken, but which can help us envisage ‘something else’ – the truly new media as we do not perhaps know them yet.

The graduates of Goldsmiths’ MA Digital Media Practice pathway whose work is showcased here have seriously engaged with this interpellation to invent otherwise. Capturing the vitality of new media practices, they have also injected life into the conceptual and technical landscape of digital culture, a landscape which often seems to produce just more of the same via incessant commercial updates and upgrades. In their respective projects, they have thus all attempted to perform what Angela McRobbie has termed a ‘socially engaged, critical creativity’. In other words, they have followed the injunction to ‘invent well’ – that is to say, creatively and critically – forms ever new.

Dr Sarah Kember and Dr Joanna Zylinska
Tutors on Goldsmiths’ MA Digital Media: Technology and Cultural Form