Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media

From online information searches and e-commerce transactions to mobile phone messaging and Bash drives, we are immersed in the digital realm on an everyday basis. Information about the world, encoded in the form of digital data, expands exponentially. Consider a yottabyte (YB). It is equivalent to all the books ever written in every language, 62 billion iPhones or one septillion bytes. The American states of Delaware and Rhode Island, divided into city block-sized data warehouses, would currently be what is needed to store a single yottabyte using the average capacity of PC hard drives today. Yet, in the not-so-distant future, a yottabyte could be contained in a miniscule area no larger than a pinhead. Technologies and data rapidly evolve and spread out. Through this kind of futuristic perspective, it could be argued that everything in the natural, material world will soon have a digital, virtual counterpart, of one form or another, or even be replaced by it. These counterparts- as digital data- offer not only unprecedented possibilities for science and technology but also for cultural identity, creative practice and interdisciplinary thinking.