I have been following this discussion with great interest but there has 
been something nagging at me.  The conversation seems to have almost 
exhausted every inroad to net art and new media but the a little voice 
keeps on telling me that this discussion is a bit like preaching to the 
choir. I am trying to put together a presentation on intangible art and 
specifically net art and I understand that the audience I will be facing 
might only have a very vague sense of what net art might be.  I mean – I 
can almost hear the question ‘where is Potatoland exactly?’ and to be 
perfectly honest I don’t have the answer.

Yes… my apologies – I am back on Charlie’s case…

*Is 'new media art' actually 'art'?
*If so, why?
*If not, why not?

Charlie

But I don’t buy Tom’s comment … So "yes" new media art *is* "art", if we 
say it is because I have a problem with the operative term ‘we’.

Coming across net art online may be serendipitous – through a zine link, a 
friend sending an deep url urging you – ‘go look at this its really cool’ – 
how then is the uninitiated to know that it is art -  I mean - if I don’t 
come across one of Napier’s projects via the Whitney, Guggenheim or SFMoMA 
but serendipitously drop in to Pototaland on the fly. As Gibson said – 
there must be some sort of consensual hallucination going on here – in this 
case it is not about the Internet but about where net art is taking place 
and how is it recognised when one bumps into it.

And in spite of the fact that I can almost see you all shaking your fists 
at me – I would like to reopen the discussion on institutional recognition… 
(ducking…).

I have been trying to look at net art/new media/whatever through the 
paradigm of the Encoding/Decoding media scenario of contemporary semiotics 
such as (Stuart Hall 1980) and the institutional practices of production 
(John Corner 1983) the moment of encoding, the moment of the text – the new 
media act and the subsequent moment of decoding which is just a predicated 
on artistic gesture/reception as the first moment of encoding.

My point being if no one tells the surfer he is consuming art he might not 
even notice (this is no doubt where some of you are saying … its doesn’t 
matter) I personally think it does…. Then of course we could get into a 
rather drawn out philosophical discussion on ‘if a tree falls in the middle 
of the forest… etc...  But this is where taxonomies and vocabularies need 
to put into place – (Beryl’s categories are an excellent starting place) 
and I have been trying to do my own list using the three moments of 
production, distribution and consumption… (I would love some input here)…

Production - performance  -  icons - text - browsers - spam-art 
-  e-mail  - software  -  code -  algorithms - video – audio.

Distribution - websites  -  cell phones - discourse 
-  CD/DVD  -  performance - chat  -  SMS - PDA’s  -  e-mail -   proprietary 
software.

Consumption - home - school - galleries -  web-zines – festivals - 
competitions – media centres - conferences - discussions lists.

* Of course several of the terms will always appear in more than one category

My problem with all this free floating artistic practice going on all 
around us is that there is now (more than ever) and acute need for 
institutional authentication and validation – and this needs negotiating on 
both sides of the encoding/decoding paradigm…

Encoding - artistic gesture
Decoding- user recognition

Basically I am reiterating the need for some sort of institutional 
butterfly-pinning if we desire to see ‘our beloved object’ evolve in 
festivals, galleries, media centres places where real people actually step 
across the doorway and recognise that what they had discovered online in 
fact emerged from individuals, or group practices in specific locations 
around the world…. I suppose if I really have no choice – I could run a 
whois search and assure myself that Cyberspace is made up of real people.

Susan Hazan
Jerusalem/London

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of 
legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught 
mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from 
banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines 
of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of 
data. Like city lights, receding..." Willaim Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)



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Susan Hazan

Curator of New Media
New Media Unit
Computer and Information Systems
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
http://www.imj.org.il
Tel: +972-2-6708066
Fax: +972-2-6708077
Mobile: +972-55-550686
[log in to unmask]

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No trees were killed in the creation of this message
However, many electrons were displaced and terribly inconvenienced
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