Avant-Garde and New Media: What Didn't Dziga Vertov Know?
In his seminal book on the topic, Lev Manovich famously used Dziga Vertov's 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera to illustrate fundamental characteristics of new media. The striking similarity between many Vertov's and other avant-garde discoveries and contemporary new media leads us to the question: what is there in new media that avant-garde did not practice or at least presage? If contemporary technology made a lot of avant-garde dreams possible, would an avant-garde artist make a full-blown contemporary media artist if s/he miraculously obtained this technology, or would he still be missing something very important?

Imitations of Life: What Is Visual Evidence Beyond Indexicality?
Photography emerged as a documentary genre first and foremost because it created indexical signs of reality: actual light reflected from an actual object left an actual trace on the sensitive plate without much interference on the part of the photographer. As such, a photograph constituted a legally acceptable document, visual evidence of the thing "having being there" in front of the lens. This status was then shared by cinematography and analog voice recording, both providing an immediate link between actual object and its visual or acoustic sign. However, with the advent of the digital, the indexicality of technology-based visual images is vanishing rapidly. Does this mean that there will soon be no more visual documents in the evidentiary sense of the word or is there something that is replacing indexicality as a guarantee of reality?

The Gallery and the Metro: How Does New Media Art Change Everyday Perceptions?
A person entering a contemporary art gallery, one with media art installations in particular, is forced to change their mundane way of perceiving the world. He encounters split screens, multiple points of view, the collapse of spatial and temporary distances, dislocation and dissolution of stable subjective identities, etc. Such works of art are often considered harbingers of the new perceptual discipline that will at some point become dominant in the world at large. Is this process of the pedagogy of perception really underway? For example, when our visitor leaves the gallery and enters the metro or any other conventional space, does he bears a residue of the gallery experience and sees the world in some novel ways that have a potential to become widespread?

Tradition and Contemporary Media Art: Is Classical Art Still Relevant?
It has been claimed since the time of the Impressionists, if not earlier, that contemporary art destroys classical three-dimensional visual space and other traditional art forms and replaces them with something altogether different. It is clear, nonetheless, that lived experience of classical art, such as academic painting, was indispensable for historical avant-garde, whose subversion of classic artistic norms would have been incomprehensible without it. What is the situation with contemporary media art? Is it only thinkable as a reaction formation to previous art forms (classical or avant-garde) or has it acquired a degree of self-sufficiency? In other words, is the implied spectator of new media still expected to have lived through "old media" experiences in order to appreciate new media and comprehend its messages?