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This conversation is getting really meaty. Let's consider one thing. Sooner or later, _someone_ is going to create a classification that will stick in the history books, regardless of how distasteful that might sound. It might take 5 years, 20, or 100, but it will happen, and eventually we will all be quite dead, and unable to object. Power and control - I have no answer to this, but will we as technological artists (note I'm not using NM, as I'm talking more broadly), come to some social contract regarding our own taxonomies/classifications, or Powers forbid, announce a 'Movement'? In this project, there will have to be a lot of negotiation and compromise if we are to define ourselves (hopefully quite broadly). If not, the 'we' who are historians and curators will classify the technological genres in the artists' stead. I know several historians who are in the gates getting ready to do just this. And when they publish, that's that, or at least as more of them publish, it will become more of a fait accompli. The pin will be through the thorax of the butterfly. Some of you may object to this, and to an extent, so do I. However, this is historiography, and are we going to be Smithsons or Bierstadts (shaping the terrain, or masterfully representing it)? Patrick Lichty Editor-In-Chief Intelligent Agent Magazine http://www.intelligentagent.com 1556 Clough Street, #28 Bowling Green, OH 43402 225 288 5813 [log in to unmask] "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." -----Original Message----- From: Curating digital art - www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/ [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ivan Pope Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:20 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: power/control > Subject: power/control > > While conceding that, of course, taxonomies are made in the > service of power and control, simply to imagine that we can > dispense with them seems to me to be problematic. I suggest > the alternative is not the occupation of some space beyond > the control of categories and so on Personally, I've been waiting for this discussion to get to grips with taxonomies, rather than with discussion of terms such as 'new media' and 'media art'. I guess if we are discussing taxonomies we should discuss the taxonomy of our field and not get bogged down in the 'is new media a good term for this, is there a better term'. The problem with taxonomies is that they require some groundwork and then that that groundwork be generally accepted, and then that there be some way of categorising entries into that taxonomy. Do we really want to go down that formal route? What could a taxonomy be for the field that Crumb covers? Cheers, Ivan