OM2 Daniel Cunningham

Biography

Daniel Mudie Cunningham is an academic specialising in contemporary art, design and cinema. Based in the Blue Mountains, Australia, Daniel completed his PhD on ‘white trash’ film cultures at the University of Western Sydney in 2004. Presently he lectures in design history and theory at the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. Daniel has book chapters in The Bent Lens (Allen & Unwin, 2003) and Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (Routledge, forthcoming 2006). A widely published freelance arts writer, Daniel’s publications can be found at PopMatters.com, SensesofCinema.com, TheFilmJournal.com, Refractory, IF Magazine, Scene Design Quarterly, Photofile and Sydney Star Observer. Daniel is also an independent curator, having staged ten group art exhibitions in Sydney galleries since 1994.

Old New Media.

An essay by D.M.C.

{9th of August 2005}

“In the time when new media was the big idea

That was the big idea.”

U2 ‘Kite’

When Bono sings this lyric about new media, I can’t help but wonder if “the big idea” is their own use of technology during the late nineties when U2 staged the ambitious Zoo TV tour. Bono appears to be using the term ‘new media’ as a convenient moniker for the techno-fetishistic saturation of screen-based media they once employed, as if new media was “the big idea” of the recent past.

According to American cultural critics Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston:

“Bono’s various couplings on stage with mirrors, cameras and video equipment fundamentally undermined otherwise stable relationships between fan and star, disconcerting the technology of rock stardom by insisting that the star is the trick of the dazzling lights.”

Even though Bono’s onstage persona became pure postmodern spectacle, a kind of simulated ‘trick’ of image rendering technology, the relationship described between audience and star is bereft of the interactivity required by new media forms. Zoo TV wasn’t really ‘new media’ but a new way of recombining ‘old media’—that is, screen-based media that has been with us for a significant part of the twentieth-century.

U2’s song lyric has gained a renewed, somewhat ironic currency in Australia because new media was “the big idea,” until the Australia Council [national Arts Council] announced in December 2004 their plans to dissolve the New Media Arts Board (NMAB).