//quo: The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media. Christiane Paul

"A lowest common denominator for defining new media art seems to be its computability, the fact that it is computational and based on algorithms.
Other descriptive adjectives commonly used for charactering new media art are process-oriented, time-based, dynamic, and real-time; participatory, collaborative, and performative; modular, variable, generative and customizable."

"Interaction and participation are key elements in transforming new media works into ‘open systems’. The openness of the system differs substantially from one digital artwork to the next, and one could argue that the degree of openness is directly related to the investment of time the viewer-participant has to make and the amount of expertise necessary to engage with it."

"Openness increases in projects where artists have established a framework that allows participants to create a contribution to the system…"

"Collaborative exchange has become a fundamental part of artistic new media practice and has affected notions of the artwork and authorship, which in turn have fundamental consequences for curatorial practice and the presentation of the art. The artistic process in new media creation to a large extent relies on collaborative models, which manifest themselves on various levels."

"While artists groups and collectives are by no means a new phenomenon that emerged along with digital media, they certainly have not been in the majority when it comes to artistic creation, and the art world in general has traditionally been focused on the model of a single creator and ’star’."

info:

The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media, Christiane Paul, 2005
in: Oliver Grau (Editor), Media Art Histories, 2006, The MIT Press