The termmetamedia, coined byAlan Kay andAdele Goldberg, refers to new relationships betweenform and content in the development of newtechnologies and newmedia.[1]
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the term was taken up by writers such asDouglas Rushkoff andLev Manovich. Contemporary metamedia, such as at Stanford, has been expanded to describe, "a short circuit between theacademy, theart studio andinformation science exploring media and their archaeological materiality."[2] Metamedia utilizesnew media and focuses on collaboration across traditional fields of study, melding everything fromimprovisational theatre and performance art, toagile, adaptive software development andsmart mobs.
The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.
Stanford University Humanities Lab andMIT currently run research labs investigating metamedia.[2][3] The MIT lab's mission is to provide a flexible online environment for creating and sharingrich media documents for learning on core humanities subjects.[4] It is led byKurt Fendt (co-Principal Investigator and Manager of the Metamedia project) andHenry Jenkins.[5]
Stanford's lab is principally facilitated byMichael Shanks (archaeologist) with other collaborators, includingHoward Rheingold,Fred Turner (academic), andChristopher Witmore. In its mission statement, it describes itself as a "creative studio and laboratory space for experimenting and taking risks...a democratic and collaborative assembly of archaeologists, anthropologists, classicists, communications experts, new media practitioners, performance artists, sociologists, software engineers, technoscientists, and anyone else who wants to join."[6] A recent project is Life Squared (aka Life to the Second Power), an animated archive of the work of artistLynn Hershman in the online worldSecond Life. Life Squared is one endeavor of The Presence Project, a live metamediaperformance art project within the Metamedia lab.[7]