Hi everyone,
slight correction / expansion on my exchange with Steve (which took place at a conference at the Tate earlier this year and which he referenced in his remarks at the reception for "The Art formerly known..."): the exchange was not exactly about the inability to work with other curators because they don't have a clue. In my talk at the Tate I had outlined differences in the process of curating new media vs. more traditional art forms (I pointed to the oppositions outlined inAnne Marie-Scheiner's article, http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_curation_schleiner.html). During the Q&A, Steve posed the question whether what I described as specific to the new media curatorial process didn't  increasingly apply to the process of curating contemporary art in general. And I replied with a decisive 'no' and poinetd out that the curatorial process of most of my collegues  still seems to radically differ from mine and they indeed sometimes don't have a clue what I'm talking about when I follow models that are common practice in mew media curation (particularly networked and distributed practice). Needless to say that can make it difficult to work with each other because there is a lot of of "translation" required on both ends and you need to be committed and enthusiastic about the art to have a basis for collaboration  (I do not see overwhelming enthusiasm for new media art in most institutions).
Best,
Christiane


-----Original Message-----
From: Curating digital art - www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/ on behalf of Edward Shanken
Sent: Sun 10/9/2005 4:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: REFRESH! reflections
 
Miscellaneous reflections on;  1) "new media" (term);
2) The Art Formerly Known as New Media; 3) Continuity
v Rupture.

1. Re: "New Media" (the term):  In one of breakout
sessions during the summit the Mashiko noted that in
Japan, the term "new media art" is no longer used;
they dropped the "new" and now just call it "media
art."  There is, as Darko noted, a historic
precedent/parallel in New Tendency in Zagred, which
abandoned the "new" in their name, and just called it
Tendency.  Although the common French translation,
"Nouvelle Tendence" has a lovely ring to it (at least
to American ears) and may be excused for its
short-sighted avant-gardist utopianism, I think there
is less of an excuse for scholars in the 21st century,
after endless critiques (over a quarter century ago!)
of originality and the avant-garde, to use the term
"new."  That was pounded out of me as a grad student
at Duke and I, in turn, pound it out of my students. 
It is intellectually lame and lazy to simply accept to
use this term uncritically because it is expedient.

2.  The Art Formerly Known as New Media.  I was
delighted by the title of Sarah and Steve's
exhibition, which problematized the term as a
historical phenomenon, one which they provocatively
posit, is over and done.  In fact, I bought the
T-shirt.  I also ditched an afternoon session and went
back to see the exhibition.  The promise of the title
was not, in my opinion, sustained by the work in the
show, which, in fairness to the curators, was limited
to work produced at BNMI during the last 10 years and
subject to a variety of constraints.  For example, of
Catherine Richard's Shroud/Chryssalis II was not the
original work done at Banff (which involved a
performative wrapping of individuals in copper mesh)
but a reworking of that work as a static installation
employing video projection.  The installation was
quite exquisite, but it was not the work itself and
the disjunction between the two was not problematized.
 Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon, commissioned for the
Guggenheim, where it was presented as a large
projection installation, was presented at Walter
Phillips Gallery as a website. Christiane Paul's talk
addressed the multiple formal manifestations of such
work in various contexts, and a more critical language
needs to be developed and employed in discussing such
shifts from the perspective of art production,
curation, audience interaction, and historicization.  

Aside from Michael Naimark's See Banff, which was on
the fritz for a while, then back in action later, the
extraordinary and pioneering early VR work produced at
Banff was not to be seen, presumably because of cost,
though perhaps also because of issues of obsolesence,
etc.  I don't think that Sarah and/or Steve need to
defend their choices, but I do think that a critical
analysis of institutional constraints, perhaps in
comparision with the constraints that impact
traditional curating, might offer valuable insight
into vital issues in curating art that employs
"relatively new media" (this is one of the terms I
like to use, tongue-in-cheek.)

I regret that when I went back to the show, I couldn't
find 3 people to interact with me in Greg Niemeier, et
al's piece, which requires multi-user collaboration. 
I thought most interesting works were Garnet Hertz's,
Experiments in Galvanism  Martin Wattenberg and Marek
Walczak's Thinking Machine 4.  Experiments employs a
web-server and robotic devices implanted in a large
frog, floating in mineral oil, connected to the Web,
so that remote participants can activate the frog's
left or right leg.  It's quirky and monstrous, absurd
and functional.  Thinking Machine is an interactive
chess-set that, I gather, enables assisted chess
playing, based on a history of previous user
decisions) and can play by itself, or with one or two
users. The realization of the piece is quite fine,
employing projections of colored light that allow the
user to learn which of the possible next moves was
most popular, by the depth and intensity of the
projected scratch marks.

3. Continuity vs. Rupture in Theory and Practice.  The
discourse at the conference included adherents to both
lines of thought, as well as some, who think that both
occur.  The issue is less one of one or another camp
being right or wrong, but to focus more attention on
debating the ideological stakes involved in making
claims of radical rupture or claims of continuity, and
proceeding cautiously.  During Steve's gallery talk,
he mentioned an exchange with Christiane in which he
asked why she did not simply work with the other
curators at the Whitney on a project.  She replied to
Steve that he understands what it is that she does,
and she understands what the other curators do but she
could not work with them because they do not have a
clue (and, I hope I'm not making this up, but are not
even interested in it, either) about what she does or
the complex of issues that pertain to her sub-field as
"Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts."  This example
seemed to me to be a perfect instance of radical
rupture and continuity simultaneously occuring in
practice.  On the one hand, the Whitney has a curator
of "New Media Arts" (continuity) but on the other
hand, the she cannot work with other curators in her
institution because they don't understand what she
does and aren't really interested in it, either
(rupture). As an art historian, I might add that my
own personal experience is not quite so positive as
Christiane's.  Few, if any, art history departments at
major research universities have yet to recognize the
value of creating positions for art historians whose
research focuses on the historic and contemporary use
of science and technology, including old, middle-aged,
and new media.  When vying for positions for
specialists in modern and/or contemporary art, my
experience has been that my sub-speciality is
misunderstood and undervalued.  Despite the fact that
I had to master the same historic material that other
modern/contemporary art history scholars had to master
(i.e. French Rev to the present) and that we all will
have to teach the same survey courses: ren - present,
20th century art, art since 1945, etc., other scholars
are more comfortable with a modern/contemporary
colleague whose sub-specialty is Cubism or AbX than
our unauthorized, uncanonized field.  Again, in
practice, a rupture exists between what we do and what
others in our larger field conceive of as appropriate
topics of research.  Ironically, a key aspect of my
scholarship is an attempt to theorize and demonstrate
continuities where previously historical and critical
narratives insisted on rupture...  e.g. "Art in the
Information Age:  Technology and Conceptual Art"

Sarah - Erkki's talk was excellent; one of my
favorites in the conference.  His talk was a perfect
demonstration of the value of the media-archaeological
method, drawing together early devices, including
Plateaux's Anorthscope disks (c. 1829) and Iwai's
contemporary Distorted House, which were independently
discovered 170 years apart!  The danger of this
approach is that everything can melt into everything
else on the basis of formal/technical similarity. It
is important, I think, to be sure to identify the vast
social and material differences in which parallel
developments, or remediations, emerge, so that both
similarities and differences are respected.  Such a
comparative, media-archaeological history may yield
particularly useful insights about the particular
conditions of each moment and the particular
significance of the work as it emerged under those conditions.


		
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