Hi everyone

Sorry to be so slow in joining this discussion. I found that I had
exceeded my inbox quota, which meant that I couldn't send stuff till I
had archived some of my old emails, which wasn't possible in Banff

A few thoughts on REFRESH! 

I thought it was a fascinating conference, but also deeply frustrating
and sometimes quite odd. On the plus side it was extraordinary for
somebody who has been working at the margins of other disciplines to
advocate the legitimacy of the study of art, culture and technology to
go to a conference in which it is central. Extraordinary and somewhat
deflating. I am a bit wary of the self-congratulatory and even slightly
smug air of legitimisation that I felt there, especially given that it
threatened to produce precisely the institutionalisation and
canon-creation that we should be firmly opposing. There were also way
too many people determined to assert their claim in this disciplinary
gold rush and a distinct lack of really critical debate, other than a
rehashing of the usual internal debates about the nature, status and
definition of new media art. The one place in which such a debate could
have been had, the Rudolf Arnheim lecture given by Sarat Maharaj, was a
disaster. The opportunity to produce a genuinely interesting engagement
with the questions of the conference from outside was passed over for a
rambling, incoherent and, I have to say, intellectually weak, talk.
While listening I suddenly understood why many people are so deeply
alienated from and hostile to art theorising, if this is to be taken as
an example from somebody of sufficient importance in the field to be
asked to give a keynote at an international conference on art. Also, if
this is an example of a new kind of networked, hypertextual, associative
discourse borne out of our new techno-cultural conditions, then I feel
that we should be resisting such conditions and asserting the necessary
of virtues of clarity and linearality.

OK; grumpy old man rant over

Here is the text for the little introduction I gave to Eddie and my
session on historical issues at REFRESH!, which does engage with some of
the questions of this month's subject

The recent Open Systems c. 1970 show at Tate Modern caused a lot of
prospective excitement among new media art people in Britain, which was
followed by a great deal of disappointment when it opened. Despite its
highly promising title it had little to do with systems of systems art
or technology and art. In the exhibition itself there was none of the
work done by artists using systems ideas and technologies, circa 1970,
while the catalogue, other than a few token mentions of Cybernetic
Serendipity and Software and the inclusion of a Jack Burnham essay,
suggested that the curators and contributors were barely aware of these
phenomena. Instead what we got was a predictable and reductive vision of
art in that period as consisting of a shift from Minimalism to
Conceptualism. In fairness at the conference that was held on the show's
last weekend, the chief curator, Donna de Salvo did have the good grace
to admit that she did not even know about these ideas and issues, or the
work in question that, to many of us, was so obviously absent, though it
seems odd to have given the show a name that suggested otherwise.

This ignorance or disavowal of the relation between art and technology
is not simply the fault of the curator's understanding of the period or
their preferences and taste. It is, I think, far deeper than that, and
goes to the heart of the question that animates this conference, that of
the acknowledgement of a whole area of practice and theory that is
largely not visible in mainstream art galleries, museums and art history
departments. It is partly a question of a humanist conception of a
binary opposition between art, poiesis etc... on the one hand and
technics, technology, tekhne on the other. There is a great deal that
could be said about that, and I hope that the papers this afternoon will
stimulate discussion and debate on precisely that question.

It is also perhaps a structural or systemic issue. New media art (let us
stick for convenience with that problematic term) is much more than
simply another form of, possibly, avant garde art practice, that meets
at first with resistance, then finally acceptance within the academy and
the gallery. It is, rather, a representation of, a symptom and even a
determinant of a dramatic shift, a 'paradigm shift' if you will, in how
culture is stored and disseminated, and in how it endures, or what one
might call, in the broadest sense, the archive. Bernard Stiegler
proposes that the capacity to preserve and transmit human experience in
the radical absence, and ultimately the death of the person who has the
experience 'is what we call culture'. Thus the current dramatic shifts
in the technological structures of our means of storage and
dissemination will dramatically change our culture, entirely. Stiegler's
mentor, Jacques Derrida proposes that 'the technical structure of the
archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable
content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship
to the future. This archivization produces as much as it records the
event' and 'what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer
lived in the same way.'

It is therefore not surprising that museums, galleries and art history
departments cannot incorporate new media art. They are still structured
according to the techno-cultural conditions of the times in which they
first emerged, the late 18th and early 19th century. The question should
not be how do we get the mainstream institutions of art to acknowledge
and incorporate new media art, but rather to recognise and engage with,
to respond to, the new forms of culture new technological conditions
produce. To respond to something is to take responsibility, and in
responding to the past and present new media art and hoping to encourage
others to do so, we are perforce taking responsibility for new media
art's continued existence in the future, against its current occlusion
by the institutions of art history, and to make a wager that it matters
now and will matter in the future and for helping understand how we live
now and in the future. 

Charlie Gere 
Reader in New Media Research
Director of Research
Institute for Cultural Research 
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php