NEW MEDIA ART, POSTHUMANISM, NEW MATERIALISM, AND THE SUB-DIRECTIONS OF THINKING PERSPECTIVES EMERGING FROM THE INTERACTION OF THESE FORMS

New media art or technology-based art coexist in Latvia, but terminological shortcomings and unclear guidelines for evaluating technology-based art are evident. Terminological shortcomings and diversity of terms are observed among institutions, as well as in the use by media art researchers. Works created using digital technologies, which are included in the LNMM archive, are categorised under the sculpture or other fine art structural unit, complicating the process for the searcher to find the media work they are looking for in the digital archive, searching for it according to the principles and characteristics of media art evaluation. New technologies and works of art created using digital technologies require new evaluation principles and unified evaluation terminology, given the diversity of the materialities of technological works and their different perspectives. The author examines the concepts of posthumanism and new materialities, focusing on how these theoretical directions influence the evaluation of digital artworks and formulating the questions about how posthumanist schools, such as critical posthumanism and transhumanism, offer different perspectives on the evaluation of technologies. The article highlights digital materialism and neomaterialism as essential approaches to understanding and analysing new media art, examining the application of these approaches in the works of various artists in Latvia and the world. Using qualitative methods (critical literature and discourse analysis, case study analysis), the author focuses on the evaluation of augmented reality (XR) works by Latvian and international media artists, based on the principles of neomateriality proposed by Christiane Paul, as well as supplementing the principles with her own proposals for the evaluation of technology-based art.