Abstract

Recent interpretations of new media art call it “neo-baroque,” relating late 20th and early 21st century visual art with that of the 17th century. I follow up on the neo-baroque theory by pushing the fundamental themes of new media art that are implicit in, but largely unrecognized by these neo-baroque analyses. New media art provides an account of the durational structure of the mundane world: it is an actual inexhaustibly infinite process of serially iterative actualization that is immanent in the activity of becoming. Yet, new media art provides an account of reality that takes up the baroque emphases on transfiguration, ecstasy, and ultimately of the infinite nature of the universe and refigures them in contemporary terms. The experience of this art is at the same time an experience of the mundane world and an experience of the inexhaustible infinite.