Geoff's comments hit a raw nerve - the same way that the museum community
has recently been debating the definition of 'the museum' on icom-L and
elsewhere - perhaps a good starting point to sense the parameters of the
'object' we are building a taxonomy for - would be to try and define (or
name) the beast...
As a Curator of New Media - I seem to spend a lot of time defending the
appendage 'new' and concur with Geoff when he notes…
‘And stating the obvious perhaps: It has been well established that 'New
Media' is a particularly problematic phrase in this respect in that 'media'
is hardly an adequate term to describe the practices that involve
computation, and 'new' is often ahistorical ('when old media were new' and
so on). Perhaps this emphasises that practice should necessarily come first’.
I would welcome (yet another) discussion on the definition of our field -
and perhaps by defining not only what may be included as ‘the practice’...
but also as Geoff mentions
‘The orthodoxy appears to be to establish historical analogies with emergent
practices. This seems useful but often too loosely applied - like Manovich's
'language of new media' reduced to cinema. These again are at best strategic
it seems to me’.
but also what is NOT included - it might be useful to try and think about
what couldn’t possibly be included within the keywords and potential
categories...
Beryl’s suggestion -
’For me, some of the most useful categories
for me are those which concern "medium-independent behaviours"
(Ippolito) such as Steve Dietz's "Interactivity, Connectivity, Computability’.
do not adequately describe the field as activities that are all implemented
in a machine readable environment – strategic or not – I would welcome a
discussion that defines our discipline/practice – perhaps if we collated
all our different job titles we might get some inkling of what it is that
we all do …like for example – do we all work a priori in a discipline that
is intrinsically machine-readable?
susan
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