New media art, based on the intersection of art, science, and technology, as well as networked commons and sociopolitical activism, is a challenging object of art-critical analysis. This art field has a long and rich history, a broad network of institutions, initiatives and informal communities, yet it has historically had limited visibility in the institutionalised system of contemporary visual art and conventional art criticism. It can be argued that it is a parallel art world that exists in an isolated autonomous ecosystem, and is mostly reflected on within the latter. Due to this reason, new media art discourse has often lacked a more objective insight from the outside – the few art critics who commented on new media art phenomena encountered difficulties related to contextual vocabulary usage. In their turn, advocates of new media art, who pursued its legitimation, simultaneously sought to distance themselves from the supposedly hegemonic system of traditional art institutions and the art market, further deepening the discursive divide. In Lithuania, the result of this mutual misunderstanding or ignorance, coupled with the limited size of the new media movement itself, was that media art, which had briefly caught the attention of art experts in the late 1990s mostly due to its formal novelty, and became a phenomenon with a developed discourse relevant to a specific community, eventually failed to establish itself as a current, well-reflected practice synchronised with international processes, and remained essentially marginalised in the Lithuanian art history two decades later. The decline of the discourse was also influenced by the global factors of technological progress. New media art succesfully existed as an autonomous field when digital and network technology was not widespread, and artists had the privilege of exposing their invisible mechanisms to the broader public, acting as visionaries who heralded a more democratic and creative future. However, as this technology permeated all social strata and became routine, techno-utopian visions lost their currency, and were superseded by less straightforward renderings of technology’s impact delivered by post-digital art forms.