Gloria Sutton wrote:

> discussions about contemporary art and new media used to take
> place in the same conversation, be written about in the same
> publications and show in the same venues. Earlier, artists
> interested in issues of media, computation, social networks,
> and communication theories used to be in active dialogue with
> their contemporaries probing other issues under the general
> guise of "conceptual art."

> I agree with Pete Gome's mining of "expanded cinema."
> Personally, this is my area of research so I am biased, but I
> agree that expanded cinema's fluid definitions may prove to
> really helpful in shifting the definition of new media art
> from a strictly R&D model of production which emphasizes
> material output toward a more conceptual model.

> unlike earlier
> moments when definitions were usually connected to individual
> artists' practices, new media art has sort of, in my
> estimation, been reversed engineered so to speak.

My background goes like this: I was at Goldsmiths' from 1997-2000 and while
there (working in opposition to the Freeze/Hirst bandwagon) I discovered the
global networks. I came out of college determined to work with technology
and networks, though I never saw this as a separate discipline. I was
interested in and worked a lot with installation/performance and expanded
cinema during the first half of the nineties. During this time I struggled
to introduce/include use of new technologies within this process. I also
continued to develop work within and around the networks (for example I made
the first HTTP based piece of work and brought Heath Bunting to the internet
in 1993). Although I was fascinatd by the technology and network side of the
work, I always took the view that it didn't exist as art without the history
and traditions of contemporary art, within which it should find a place.
However, by the end of the nineties the lure of 'new media' in all its
manifestations had proved too strong to resist. Gloria writes that new media
art was 'reverse engineered' and this is indeed a lovely way of looking at
it. However, I believe more than this there was a complicitness between
artists and funders/curators etc to invent and promote this strand. All my
experience would show that it indeed became easier to gain funding for
projects that had a sense of newness and adventure about them, and a lot of
work came to be pitched in this way.
I have spent years insisting that this area must be more about art than
about technology, and naming something for its technology (and isn't 'new
media' just a euphemism for 'touched by computers and stuff') has got to be
a bad move, though it's a start.
I note now that the Arts Council in the UK removed all the categories of
funding that they used to have, and now you have to define your own funding
requirements. This of course does something similar to Ars Electronica's
move - it forces the artist to consider their own position in relation to
everything else, not just in relation to the small bubble that the
funders/commissiners give them an opportunity to slip into. I would hope
that this will make people look at art rather than at technology for
antecedents and references, but who knows.
I still believe that great art will come from this liberation we have seen,
the liberation from the substrate, the medium. But we maybe need to get a
bit further down the line and let the hardware and software recede a bit
more into the distance before someone picks up the tools and blows us all
away.
We'll probably know it happens when, as Gloria says, we see that amazing
show where painters and sculptors and filmmakers and, ahem, media artists,
are all without prejudice in the same space.
Cheers,
Ivan