New media art inherits the oldest creative questions — what is an image, what is presence, what is the relationship between maker and made — and brings them into contact with technologies whose cultural meaning is still unsettled. The challenge is not only technical but critical: to make digital work that is more than demonstration, that uses the medium's properties in service of something worth saying. The best new media work does not celebrate the tool but disappears into the perception it creates.
Each step builds on the last.