Hi,
Just as an introduction, I am currently a Phd student in art history at
UCLA was on the board of directors of Rhizome.org between 1998-2002 and
currently I'm at Ars in Linz.  I put together the 25 year timeline of
Ars that's in the Brucknerhaus lobby which ended up being an
interesting/problematic project that has framed some of my thinking
about the discussions on this list and the issue of typologies  for
art, specifically what gets labeled as new media.

In tracking the development of "new media art" and its earlier
permutations, "intermedia", "multimedia," art and technology," etc.
over the past 25 years for this Ars project, what became strikingly
obvious to me  was that at an earlier moment discussions about
contemporary art and new media used to take place in the same
conversation, be written about in the same publications and show in the
same venues. Earlier, artists interested in issues of media,
computation, social networks,  and communication theories used to be in
active dialogue with their contemporaries probing other issues under
the general guise of "conceptual art."  There was a moment when Stan
Vanderbeek would be exhibiting with Robert Whitman and Dan Graham (The
Projected Image show at ICA Boston, 1967) or Les Levine could be in the
same show as Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, and Lawrence Wiener
(Software, 1970).

The point I am bringing up is that the conversation about how to define
new media art  may need to start with acknowledging what context you
are defining the term for. The audience for Ars is a very different
audience than at LA MOCA where I am working as a researcher on an
exhibition that is focused on what the curators there label "new media
art." To them, that means Pipolotti Rist, Janet Cardiff, Darrren
Almond, Pierre Huyghe etc. which I guess in an Ars or ISEA world would
be labeled video installation or not even really show up on the same
radar screen as the work that normally gets programmed into these media
art specific events. However in the case with Linz, Darren Almond's
"Live Sentence" which is a built video environment that uses audio and
video time-delay not to mention a gigantic pneumatic  clock that is
operated remotely  is now by chance in the Lentos museum, the same
place that the "best of" new media works are being exhibited. I think
the only difference between them is that one is clearly labeled new
media art with its Ars connection and the other is just called
contemporary art.  But I wouldn't limit the context to different
museums or exhibition venues. The taxonomies that new media art
curators, academics, artists and critics are dealing with go much
deeper than the structuring logic of a museum's collection or
exhibition programming schedule, they permeate the entire culture
industry such as funding institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation
and other grant awarding bodies, and more visibly they shape or
determine the structures of art schools and graduate programs within
research universities so that the definitions of new media art are made
or shaped before the art is even produced. So the students coming out
of ITP at NYU show at Ars but those coming out of Goldsmith's etc. take
a different channel of exhibition and production even if both are
within the realm of new media art.

Secondly, new media art as a category for collection, exhibition,
archiving has been for the most part institutionally created. Unlike
other "avant gardes" or emerging media (photography, video, film), "new
media art" has been institutionally embraced within the same generation
of its introduction, by embrace, I mean included in major biennials,
have become a funding category for foundations like the Rockefellers,
even generated its own funding orgs., and now with the fact that you
can earn an MFA in net.art, created its own dept within the academy. So
unlike earlier moments when definitions were usually connected to
individual artists' practices, new media art has sort of, in my
estimation, been reversed engineered so to speak.

I agree with Pete Gome's mining of "expanded cinema." Personally, this
is my area of research so I am biased, but I agree that expanded
cinema's
fluid definitions may prove to really helpful in shifting the
definition of new media art from a strictly R&D
model of production which emphasizes material output toward a more
conceptual model. In addition, I think that conceptual art's own
contested genealogy may also be a good reference here.
And last but not least, while obviously Youngblood's book remains a
huge influence, he doesn't really do much in the way of covering
expanded cinema practices outside of the US which I think have a closer
connection to the present day issues of issues of access,
power, representation and media found in the work of Valie Export and
Lygia Clark etc.

Gloria Sutton