Hello,

This interesting debate has brought a lot of lurkers out of the 
shadows, myself included.

On 8 Sep 2004, at 5:09 pm, Aileen Derieg wrote:

> I agree with Susanne's comments about "Listening Post" in the
> category of Interactive Art this year, and I suspect that this
> category of the competition is about to undergo a more radical change.
> It was not addressed in the Statement of the Jury, but there
> already seemed to be a growing dissatisfaction with the category of
> Interactive Art when I left in 2002 - it doesn't seem to make sense
> any more, the way it did several years ago.

Perhaps something can be intimated from the successive renaming of 
academic courses, in common with competition categories, as they 
attempt to pursue the moving target of current practice. The 
undergraduate degree I studied, at the time, was called 'Interactive 
Arts'; it had previously been called 'Art and Technology', and was 
renamed 'Fine Art - Contemporary Media' after I had completed it. I 
believe it is now known as simply 'Art'.

I wonder how practical it is for competition categories to be this 
broad and inclusive. I would be more concerned if the "Listening Post" 
piece was deemed to be not 'art', rather than deemed to be not 
'interactive'.

'New media art' creates new meanings, contexts and modes of delivery, 
and whether we choose to define this stuff as 'interactive art' or just 
plain 'art', it's still just that—art.

Or is it? Steve Dietz's keynote at the British New Media conference at 
Tate Britain earlier in the year questioned whether 'new media art' is 
actually a subset of 'art' at all. I think, perhaps, that the debate on 
taxonomy is predicated on 'new media art' behaving in ways that make it 
receptive to the same art-historical treatment we apply to other types 
of art. I'm not sure that it does.

(Maybe I should have stayed in the shadows...)

Best wishes,
Michael

--
michael day
http://www.unmoving.co.uk