Dear List and Grant Kester,
Many thanks for your thoughtful and useful round-up of debates so far
- I too think that Susan Collins' 'truth to materials' debate is an
important one here - I'm sure that many artists do net.art activist
because the medium seems to lend itself to the job most excellently.
Or is it just that that the _rhetoric_ of the medium says it will be
good for the job of international communication and networking? I'm
struck by the relatively few examples of successful international
net.art activism (irational being amongst them) and I'd be very
interested to hear about what does work, and what is just rhetoric.
I'm also interested that artists like Susan Collins and Paul Sermon
have work which is very much about skills of enabling dialogue,
although it may not be explicitly activist.
>I argue that it is necessary to develop a new aesthetic paradigm (actually
>by returning to some rather old ideas about the aesthetic that predate its
>specific application to physical objects we call "works of art") based not
>on objects but on process of communication. I term these projects
>"dialogical" because they are organized not around object creation or
>reception, but around the staging of dialogical encounters of various kinds
>(see http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~gkester/).
A second point: I'd be interested to hear opinions about the coverage
of such events (criticism also came up as a major problem last
month): You argue that "conventional criticism" is about objects
rather than dialogics, which I agree is a real problem for the
serious discussion of this kind of work. There's also another kind of
more popular press coverage (such as Wired) which gets the dialogics
to a certain extent, but then treats the politics as just another New
Age 'alternative lifestyle choice', enabling hacker cowboys to ride
the range without having to give up their individualist
entrepreneurial ethics and their corporate salaries, as Vivian
Sobchack says. I know that Mute in the UK actually have pretty good
coverage of such work - are there other journalists who we should be
cultivating?
Sobchack, Vivian (1991) "What in the world: Vivian Sobchack on new
age mutant ninja hackers." Artforum29 (Apr). 24-6 .
Beryl
_________________________________________________________
Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss
http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/
Co-Editors: Telephone: +44 191 515 2896
Beryl Graham: [log in to unmask]
Sarah Cook: [log in to unmask]
|