Miltos Manetas

Miltos Manetas Born in Athens, Greece, 1964 lives between New York City and Los Angeles.

Manetas was the first artist to depict some of the most important objects of our days: the Computer hardware and the videogames as well as the Internet itself ( Internet Paintings, 2003 ). Manetas has produced oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware, created short looped fragments of video games such as "Tomb Raider," and exhibited computer-generated vibracolour prints among other things. But he was impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a really good "-ism" for this new generation of creativity.After securing financial assistance from a nonprofit called the Art Production Fund, Manetas went out and hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating such product names as Powerbook, Pentium, Zima, Swiffer and Dasani. Lexicon's assignment was to create a name for this new movement.

In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan - and a panel of people like Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker ready to provide analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled a new word for an art movement. Actually, it was the squeaky, synthetic voice of a Sony Vaio that made the announcement. The word was "Neen." (from the Salon.com article)

• selected : article in Salon.com : http://archive.salon.com/people/conv/20/21/index.html