Miltos Manetas

Miltos Manetas

Born in 1964 in Greece.
Lives and works in London.

«Miltos Manetas is a painter of contemporary life. He paints joysticks, computers, computer game consoles, and computer cables. He also paints people who are intensely engaged in the activities made possible by consumer electronics devices, such as playing a computer game. But he never shows what games they are playing or what images they are looking at. Instead he focuses on human-computer interface: hands clutching a joystick, a face looking at the screen, a body stretched across the floor in the intense concentration or, alternatively, relaxing besides a laptop, a computer console, or a tv.»

Manetas is interested also in the possibilities afforded by digital image processing and the new media. He has created a new aesthetic based on websites, which he sees as the most important and groundbreaking
art object today. Impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a new «-ism» for a new art movement that reflected our times, Manetas hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating product names as Powerbook and Pentium, to create a new name for this new movement. In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in New York - and a panel of intellectuals and scientists to provide analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled a new word for the new art movement. It was a computer voice that made the announcement: “Ladies and Gentleman, the new name for contemporary art is NEEN. We hope that you like it!”(+think.21)


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