Bluebird Creek currently has a video in progress which will document the creation of a master work by William Shipley and Daniel Stolpe. 
Shipley, a University of California linguist, rescued the California Maidu language from extinction in the early 20th Century. Shipley and Stolpe created a four volume, hand-bound limited edition bilingual translation of Maidu creation myths, illustrated by Stolpe in one-of-a-kind prints. See the Native Images Gallery website for more information on this culturally important and fascinating project. The video in progress documents the print making process and features interviews and bilingual readings by Shipley. Other BC/AD New Media projects include several other films, blogs, and podcasts, as well as an animated "Flash" poetry project.
What is "New Media"? Certainly, it is a broad term whose definition might be pursued in a doctoral thesis on the history of culture; "New Media" is a term currently in flux. But it seems appropriate to turn for elucidation to a very icon of the "New Media", to the grandfather of the "web 2.0" Wikis, the Wikipedia itself for an explanation:
According to Wikipedia,"New Media" is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the later part of the twentieth century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of New Media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is the digitizing of content into bits. There is also a dynamic aspect of content production which can be done in real time, but these offerings lack standards and have yet to gain traction. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is one of the best examples of the new media phenomenon, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors.
Most technologies described as "New Media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media do not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications - unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity.The rise of New Media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. According to Neuman (W.Russell Neuman 1991), "We are witnessing the evolution of a universal interconnected network of audio, video, and electronic text communications that will blur the distinction between interpersonal and mass communication and between public and private communication". The "emergence of new, digital technologies signals a potentially radical shift of who is in control of information, experience and resources". (Andrew L. Shapiro 1999). Some scholars contend that new media, and particularly the Internet, provide the potential for a democratic postmodern public sphere, in which citizens can participate in well informed, non-hierarchical debate pertaining to their social structures.
Computers are a huge speed-up of what were previously manual techniques. e.g. calculators. New Media are the cultural objects which use digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition. e.g. (at least for now) Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, Blu-ray disks etc. The problem with this is that the definition must be revised every few years. The term "New Media" will not be "new" anymore, as most forms of culture will be distributed through computers.The language of New Media is based on the assumption that, in fact, all cultural objects that rely on digital representation and computer-based delivery do share a number of common qualities. New media is reduced to digital data that can be manipulated by software as any other data. Now media operations can create several versions of the same object. An example is an image stored as matrix data which can be manipulated and altered according to the additional algorithms implemented, such as color inversion, gray-scaling, sharpening, rasterizing, etc."Dramatically speeding up the execution makes possible previously non-existent representational technique." This also makes possible many new forms of media art such as interactive multimedia and computer games.
Manovich declares that the 1920s are more relevant to New Media than any other time period. Meta-media coincides with postmodernism in that they both rework old work rather than create new work. New media avant-garde "is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information" (e.g. hypermedia, databases, search engines, etc.). Meta-media is an example of how quantity can change into quality as in new media technology and manipulation techniques can "recode modernist aesthetics into a very different postmodern aesthetics."
Social Movement Media has a rich and storied history that has changed at a rapid rate since New Media became widely used in 1994 for communiques and organizing by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation of Chiapas, Mexico. Since then, New Media has been used extensively by social movements to educate, organize, share cultural products of movements, communicate, coalition build, and more.The WTO protests used media to organize the original action, communicate with and educate participants, and was used as an alternative media source. The Indymedia movement also developed out of this action, and has been a great tool in the democratization of information, which is another widely discussed aspect of new media movement. Some scholars even view this democratization as an indication of the creation of a "radical, socio-technical paradigm to challenge the dominant, neoliberal and technologically determinist model of information and communication technologies." A less radical view along these same lines is that people are taking advantage of the Internet to produce a grassroots globalization, one that is anti-neoliberal and centered on people rather than the flow of capital.Interactivity has become a term for a number of new media use options evolving from the rapid dissemination of Internet access points, the digitalization of media, and media convergence.
In 1984, Rice defined new media as communication technologies that enable or facilitate user-to-user interactivity and interactivity between user and information. Such a definition replaces the "one-to-many" model of traditional mass communication with the possibility of a "many-to-many" web of communication. Any individual with the appropriate technology can now produce his or her online media and include images, text, and sound about whatever he or she chooses. Thus the convergence of new methods of communication with new technologies shifts the model of mass communication, and radically reshapes the ways we interact and communicate with one another. In "What is new media?" Vin Crosbie (2002) described three different kinds of communication media. He saw Interpersonal media as "one to one," Mass media as "one to many," and finally New Media as Individuation Media or "many to many".New Media changes continuously because it is constantly modified and redefined by the interaction between users, emerging technologies, cultural changes, etc.