Modern art, reflecting and defining new intellectual, scientific, and technological developments, has radically extended the conventional media of sculpture and painting.

Following innovative ideas about representation and the free use of materials in cubism, futurism, and surrealism—particularly in the work of Duchamp—artists abandoned strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of media and embraced any means, including technological, which best served their purposes. In the past fifty years especially, ideas about time and duration have reinstated narrative in art, via filmmaking and video, the theatricality of happenings, performance and installation art, digitally manipulated photography, and virtual reality.

This pioneering book, originally published in 1999 under the title New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, discusses the most influential artists internationally—from Eadweard Muybridge to Robert Rauschenberg, Bill Viola, and Pipilotti Rist—and those seminal works that have radically transformed the map of world art. For this new and expanded edition, the book has been brought completely up to date to include the latest in digital work as technology takes art in new directions.