Neen

As the Neen Manifesto has it, "Neen stands for a still-undefined generation of visual artists. Some of them belong to the contemporary art world; others are software creators, web designers, and video game directors or animators." In the spring of 2000, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Greek artist Miltos Manetas held a press conference to announce the birth of the term "Neen," which he had hired a California branding company to invent. Manetas, whose work includes oil paintings of computer hardware and videos of clips from games, sought to unify the burgeoning number of artists in and around digital media. If they've been understandably skittish about this unification, or if, as The New York Times bluntly observed, "it's unlikely that any sort of new coinage cooked up as a conceptual exercise will take hold," that just makes Manetas a more prominent example of Neen-ness himself.