Von: Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]>
> Perhaps one of the most attractive aspects of new media art is that it's
> genealogy is probably unmappable due to the complexities and often
> contradictory aspects of its development. Perhaps this suggests that there
> is actually no meaningful signified when we speak of new media art, no
> specific area of practice, no coherent body of work or set of thematics.
> Perhaps this is a good thing.
Nonetheless, there are partisan factions in every corner. The purists in one
(eg, the self-coded conceptualism) and the indulgists in the other (ie,
picture driven -ism) - exemplary of said contradiction. Art somehow requires
its antecedents. Hence everybody will look for their points of reference,
their history of artistic production that fits the respective argument - and
if there is no art history to fall back on to, it will be some other
history, of science, culture, politics. It seems to me, that there is in
fact a lot of historicizing under way in the attempt to understand the new
and the media and the art. As there is with any other artistic production. I
guess that the theme of this month, 'video/data/new media', already takes
its cue from manovich's 'language of new media' and presumes a certain
direction/attention of discourse.
> Knowing who some of the people on this list are and their backgrounds we
> have amongst us a wealth of knowledge and even direct experience of an area
> of artistic practice which till now has evaded successful historicisation
> (perhaps happily). There is an opportunity here for the diverse stories,
> myths and traces of work and discourse of a 50 year history to be layed out
> in the public eye, recognising that there is no single "voice" or theme that
> could ever come to iconically represent such a divergent and contrasting set
> of practices. Given that we are talking about a 50 year history perhaps we
> should also drop the pretence of newness and simply talk about media
> art...although I would agree that one of the defining features of media
> based art is its continuous process of re-invention. Nevertheless, what is
> often presented as new and different usually has clear, if obscure,
> precedents.
As a flippant aside, I would suggest not to drop the 'new' in 'new media':
there may be a funny time when there is going to be "neo new media", or "new
new media", or "post new media³. But maybe "neo media" will sound catchy
too.
--
For me, 'medium' as such is less interesting: as a work of art, a video will
be as exciting as a drawing or some net-art as long as it has some relevance
at a given point in time. Medium intricately entangled with content is
another matter: if the drawing about drawing, the net-art about net-art and
the video about video are purely self-referential and are only intending to
show the medium's potential, then art is examining more of its technical
side. If it manages to employ its technical potential (thereby demonstrating
its self-reference instead of making it its topic) and add something to
viewers' understanding of the world, then it contributes to the perpetual
search for the meaning of life, or similar.
On the other side, medium in respect to net-art, I find exciting in several
ways. It offers ways of doing something, that haven't been tried a lot. One
can be an explorer, probably similar to explorers in earlier, video
territories. Access to flexible tools (such as Flash) and to the operating
space (the web) are expanding possibilities for forms that are in continual
flux. The web, as the remote other space, a parallel space, as the invisible
sub-structure to the tactile world, is, to me, a very special operating
territory. From a sculptural, object-orientated perspective, it can
formulate forms that hover in between physical realisation and pure idea, be
a spatial construct and be not one at the same time. Browsers, no matter how
ugly they are, offer a fairly unique way of interactive, non-linear viewing
- DVD video is still rather clunky in comparison.
(There may be an obscure precedent, but the whole point is that it is
obscure, ie, "the road less travelled". Therefore there are flowers by the
wayside that haven't been picked by many and can at least be examined in new
configurations, maybe even give new impetus if only to the renewed attention
for something that's dropped out of focus.)
--
Jorn
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