I've been taking a little while to digest this conversation of sorts, and
while there has been a little heat here and there, this case study of
SpacePlace does not seem unusual in that it shows some of the concerns of
(new) media art, and some of the reasons why artists are often accused of
disengagement with their audience.
Of course, there is school of artistic expression which feels that the
artist is the only voice which is important in the process, but I find this
solipsistic and often makes for less compelling work.
At this time, I salute Peter and Philip for making an effort to address this
forum. However, Peter's reply seemed to be mostly expository in nature. In
his position as administrator, he has every right to keep his part of the
discussion at that level, but consideration in a little more discussion of
the work could have been illuminating.
In addition, Philip's first repies seem to be apologetic for a bad
experience with an open curatorial system which may have had some problems.
Fair enough.
I am assuming that the last posting is (in part) due to a misunderstanding
regarding the way the conversation has been conducted through CRUMB. This
is the assumption that I would like to maintain.
What follows is a negation of Roger's and Sarah's position vis-a-vis the
SpacePlace installation (rather than a statement of difference), along with
a great deal of obfuscatory text relating to highly speculative ideas. Of
course, speculation has often been the milieu of the artist.
What it seems to me is that SpacePlace was a project designed to explore
various techniques of the creation of media narratives using new media
technologies under the loose metaphors of 'space' and 'Orbit'.
So, we have a mediaspace that uses new technologies that incorporate
elements of the metaphors in the content, but don't communicate a clear
intent beyond wondering where this body of threads and their resultant
mutations will lead. Unless i totally misunderstood the piece, all of the
text on orbitization, orbit being sculpture, the piece being datatecture,
leave a lot of broken linkages which are not resolved.
Where I see little of 'orbits' and space outside of the texts, tenuous
assiation with sculpture beyond the intersection of the architrecture and
the noosphere that Philip wants to create/access, There seems to be some
problems with the associations beween architectural space, informational
space, and orbital space.
Perhaps this was a piece that was much more about the results of the process
of the technology's effects on the information than the content of the piece
itself, but in that event, focusing on technology as process often leaves me
wanting, with a curiosity of the effect or affect of the piece.
With the declaration of a lack of 'meta-ethics', possibly alludng to an
ethics, macro or micro-ethics, SpacePlace delegates ethical responsibility
to the technology, and also some of the intentional as well. Not all of
this can be abrogated, as the artist, institution, and curator are still (in
part) responsible for the work's implementation, if not its actions.
Therefore, to not acknowledge the piece's possible ramifications would
suggest a mix of a lack of knowledge of what the piece might do, or again a
delegation of the responsibility of the piece's functions to the piece
itself.
I don't know where I stand on that. I would probably admit the possiblity
for misfire, but then, many speculative artworks do.
The explanation of much of this work and its rationales (I thought of using
raisons d'etres) conflate and obfuscate many issues, genres, and topoi in
order to justify a work that has other worthwhile points of investigation.
If this statement would have been tendered at my graduate school, it would
have been sent back for re-write for clarity and to describe what it's
really about; which is the exploration of different spaces and (space-based)
narrative through publicly-accessible information technologies.
Crits aside, what I think this conversation is getting at is responsibility
for open systems and their ramifications. This relates to artworks,
curation, WIKI, communities, and so on.
Perhaps SpacePlace suggests that merely building the field and having people
come does not create intent given a certain set of content, or that emergent
mass intent for a publicly accessible artwork has potential problems. This
is something that's still being explored, though.
From all this, methods of engagement and hyperbolic writing aside, I hope
that this discussion of an evidently problematic work is revealing useful
information about how/if we can create compelling public new mediaworks.
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