New Media ... It's Not Just a Genre Anymore

It's been a rough couple of weeks, here, as you'll know if you're one of the 2.3 regular readers of this blog.

It began with a dead monitor and some unceremonious lack of cooperation by my "old" CPU, just before my new computer was scheduled to arrive. Or so I thought. The dead monitor turned out to be a dead power source, and $25 and a couple of days later, I have a new one and the old monitor is happy and working just fine.

The uncooperative CPU, which I thought might be a fried motherboard, was in fact a bad drive. Good news: the failed drive was an external hard drive I have been using to store video and new projects--remove the drive and all is well. Bad news: the failed drive is the external hard drive I have been using to store video and new projects--there's a sh**load of stuff on there that I absolutely cannot lose or I will go postal. The drive was nowhere near full and purchased much more recently than my old, full exterrnal drive (which connects up without a fuss and works just fine, as long as you don't plan on trying to squeeze more stuff onto it ... and yes, I had managed to fill up one 250 GB external drive and was working on a second one.)

Then there's the new computer. My first bit of, er, excitement is actually how I discovered that a failed drive was causing my old CPU's problems; I hooked it up to my new computer and got the same result. But of course I didn't put two and two together until I fired up the old CPU, now sans problem drive, and it came up just fine. I only had to suffer the negative excitement of thinking my NEW box had a fried motherboard as well for about 10 minutes, so this was not as bad as it could have been.

I shall spare you the intimate details of my fourth through eighth bits of excitement, all having to do with my new compupter and its accompanying accourtrements. Suffice to say (with names changed to protect the innocent) that they include:

4. a DULL computer manufacturer that actually shipped my new computer preinstalled with bloatware that actively conflicted with the operating system, also preinstalled in the factory.

5. the same DULL manufacturer shipping the computer loaded with an incorrect driver for the graphics card they installed

6. a third-party file transfer software recommended by both the computer manufacturer and the maker of the operating system that took 22 hours to migrate the contents of one computer to the other, and proceeded to overwrite CPU and OS settings on the receipient machine, even though its documentation swore it would not do this

7. the same third-party file transfer software boasting "most applications will work fine!" but then noting in very small print "*except (fill in name of company responsible for 2/3 of my actively-used software)"

8. the inability of the exciting new operating system (a product we'll call Trapdoor Panorama, by a company we'll call MacroSquish) to maintain connection to our LAN, to the Internet, or to its own DVD drives for more than a few minutes at a time.

So, with all these challenges, mostly still not resolved, I have come to one conclusion:

"New Media" is testing me.

I say it in that particular way, giving it a sort of Godlike animation, because that's what it seems to be. It had a certain appeal, but I initially thought it was not for me. It continued to call to me--I resisted, but then responded, and then abandonned myself to it entirely. And now, it's testing my faith, challenging me to see how badly I really want to do this. I'm the modern-day net.art equivalent of Job. New Media isn't just a genre, it's a theological construct.

How strong is my commitment? Let's just say the one thing I'm grateful for over the last week is that I finally got enough time "in-world" to repair my hair and improve my shoes. My next task will be looking for land for a nice little studio and art-park ...