Hi everyone,

A few mails have lingered in my mind over the past few days, and I
haven't been able to get back to them (Sue's interesting mail, and
Grant's - which kind of made me feel a bit stupid for ignoring the
facts of life that he mentioned :) )... Michael's and Josephine's
subsequent mails mean it's harder still to go back into the various
points that have been made, but I'll attempt to make a go...
especially since Mute has come up a few times as an example of a
forum in which 'a' new media art criticism is being pursued.

First of all, I can totally understand that my seemingly totalising
gesture of hoping for a 'grand theory' of art, rather than many
smaller, situated ones, might for some illustrate the bad, old modes
that the embedded paradigms of new media supposedly demand be done
away with (the Media Archive approach Josephine quotes from Lovink
and Mulder). Similarly, as Josephine knows from discussions we've had
on the subject, as a magazine we're pretty well aware that our desire
to understand and cover the myriad new modes of political engagement
that an increasingly connected world created *did* make us drift
quite seriously away from high quality, and varied, arts coverage. On
this front, Michael's frustration, too, I recognise.

Here, though, I'd first like to come back to a point I made earlier
about the frustration *I* sometimes feel about one, or perhaps a
small number, of magazines (print, we're talking here) ending up
being regarded as the singular forums in which **art and new media**
should be dealt with. I'll never forget something Eric Kluitenberg
once said, when the magazine 21C ceased publishing... In his view, it
was the fact that there was a myriad of magazines covering a subject
that was important: the fact that they could riff off each other,
create some kind of discursive ecology, was crucial, even if some of
those magazines might stand at opposite ends of the spectrum with
regards to their actual editorial approach. He made me completely
rethink my/Mute's relationship to various magazines I'd - admittedly,
ashamedly - sometimes felt to be in competition with, and lament the
demise of others that I hadn't even liked very much.

With regard to the embedded, situated approach though, I'd contest
that that should by definition make you inclined one way or the
other: why should a situatedness in media make you necessarily less
'politically correct', rather than more? From our perspective, the
way we cover new technologies and art is very much as part of a
network, community, whatever, of people thinking through subjects and
between them drifting towards interpretations of them that feel more
urgent, or close-up, in a given moment of time. Within that
arrangement, both the terms technology and art turn out to be very
slippery ones, and in explicit terms they can be seen to recede into
the back- and foreground as the years go on. Looking back, over the
1990s, the nature of the British art market - and I'm sure others in
the oversaturated Europe and America too - as well as the pivotal
role of new technologies in the promotion of British identity (a
figure in which the creative industries came ever further to the
fore), made it nigh impossible *not* to ponder the political issues
around net art, digital art, the creative industries... In fact, from
where I'm standing, you would precisely not be dealing with the
implications of your situatedness if you didn't! The fact that the
community discussing politics & new technologies at least had a broad
view of creativity that didn't end in the museum, took on models of
DiY publishing, performance, street art, and so on was, for me again,
exactly part of what made it interesting...

On a side note, it's particularly apt to be quoting that statement
from the Adilkno collective now, because later the same voice
repeatedly lamented the absence of any 'virtual intellectuals', a
phrase which, for me at least, at the very least conjurs up images
that can only be described as 'hovering above', rather than being 'in
the middle of'. Similarly, by publishing books that claim to
represent a new media community as it came to being over the 1990s
places Geert Lovink firmly in the camp of people who attempt to
explicate a complicated field 'from the outside', rather than from
the inside, even if the sales pitch on it is precisely that it 'comes
from the inside', like a reporter relaying what he saw in the field,
or being the mediator for voices the populus doesn't quite have the
wherewithall to understand.

Either way, it's a tactic that I'm sure has been thought through
thoroughly, and I take the point about being open to the
unpredictable, or letting your hair down generally and going with the
flow. But again, I don't think taking this approach is necessarily
mutually exclusive with a politically aware, let alone engaged, art.
In the end, might it come down to the nature of the art work, and the
way in which a writer engages with it, that offers the possiblity of
squaring that circle? Again, to make a possibly old- or un-fashioned
statement , I think this maybe marks out the genuinely interesting
art: the fact that it can show an awareness of its political status,
and still produce something in excess of that.

A way you can perhaps combine this & what Kodwo and Sue were writing
about, then, is to talk about perception: Kodwo has indeed done some
amazing writing, speaking, enthusing about the way technology impacts
on perception, especially non-ocular. How he discusses the positive,
cybernetic atomisation of the body, its increased sensitisation
through creative acts with technology that many have cast as
'disembodying' or 'Cartesian' is really interesting and goes against
the grain of about a million received ideas on art and technology's
relationship to the human. The idea of physical consciousness, in the
act of DJ-ing for example, somehow drifting to the tips of the
fingers, is really potent, and in my view is much more interesting -
in the sense that it connects with smaller tools that are with us in
the everyday - than the VR-scapes of Char Davies or Roy Ascott. But
such thinking has also been used in less specific and sensitive ways,
for example in the burgeoning area of urban theory, to create
eulogies about the mass use of mobile phones, their creation of a new
phenomenology, and so on... all conveniently eliding which
corporate/state interests are involved, why they might be wanting to
work with artists concentrating on this area, and so on...

I can understand Josephine's characterisation of the attempt to
understand these contradictions as virtuous, holier than thou. But
they genuinely stem from an attempt to respond sensitively,
self-reflexively to the place of art in contemporary society, and are
not intended to create one master narrative about it that supercedes
all others. In that sense, I'd like to think of it as being neither
Catholic nor Protestant, thank you very much :)

Have a nice weekend,

Pauline.