Hi all,
Sorry to not have posted earlier, but it's been a heck of a week. At any
rate, I'll make a provocative stab in the hopes of getting things started.
What I feel is seriously lacking in a lot of new media rhetoric is any
attention to the history of aesthetics and philosophy of art, in particular
in the gee-whiz newspaper articles. Most often, in this context, the writer
starts with something inane like "are rapidly blinking colors or
role-playing styling interactive systems art?" and ends with the question
"is it art?" and leaves it at that. The issue is never picked up.
The museums glommed onto new media art because they're always looking for
the next new thing to showcase. The working assumption here is "we live in a
digital age, so there must be digital art that reflects our digital age."
This is circular at best, inane at worst. It defines neither "digital" nor
the age we supposedly live in, but the terms are used to define each other.
We may live in a digital age, but we also live in a million other ages, like
the age of wars for oil. Why not have a lot of oil-based paintings there and
say they represent are petroleum age?
The problem is that newspapers just follow what happens at museums, which
then try to get something that newspapers will want to cover. To my mind,
this way madness lies.
One prominent attempt to ground the notion of new media has been made by Lev
Manovich. He has used cinema and film theory to try to establish the
specificity of new media. To my mind, Manovich's attempts are problematic in
their interpretation of cinema, which further jeapordizes his sense of
"media," but it's at least a serious attempt. I propose that one way to have
a discussion is to discuss Manovich's ideas. We obviously don't have to read
the whole thing, but perhaps it's a way to ground our conversation in
something concrete.
|