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Putting aside the issue of whether new media curators need to have an appreciation of media technology (a question I am already on record about) Jon touches on a more general and perhaps more important matter. This concerns the role of craft in contemporary art, whether new media or otherwise. I would argue that much of contemporary art practice as found in the mainstream (the mainstream here being represented, for example, by the work one might find in Frieze magazine) has rejected the value of craft or "making". This is a process that began a long time ago (perhaps with Dada, then picked up by Fluxus and the early conceptualists and then, latterly, the neo-conceptualists) and which ebbs and flows as fashion dictates. The high tide mark appears to edge ever higher with each cycle. Assuming this context it is interesting to look at coding as the craft in new media, or making your own circuits if you are more the hardwired type. One would assume that many new media artists are, by default, neo-conceptual as their work shares with such practice a similar concern with the dematerialisation of the art object and an engagement with industrially related techniques of production. However, many new media artists (myself included, and I suspect a number of those on this list who have been arguing the value of "rolling your own" code) regard coding as an essential aspect of their creativity. This could be presented, in the present context of contemporary art practice, as sweetly old fashioned, not unlike those artists who persist in mixing their own paint, sculpting their own stone or casting their own bronze. In this sense many new media artists might be regarded as very old fashioned in their relationship to how they use their chosen media to "make". It could even be argued that to have a particular medium that you "call home" serves to undermine an artists claim to contemporaneity. Best Simon On 29.03.06 00:00, Jon Thomson wrote: > I think you raise an interesting point about the place of 'craft' in > contemporary art. What it means and how it might function? > I for one wonder whether the rise of the Artist-Curator is not in > part a consequence of (in this instance) your suggestion that, "'the > programmer,' compared to 'the artist,' is a kind of anti hero.." and > that artists, "perform more and more like designers and project > managers." Simon Biggs [log in to unmask] http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ Professor of Digital Art, Sheffield Hallam University http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/cri/adrc/research2/