this is a response to recent posts by Saul and Naomi

Saul's proposition to re-investigate site-specificity in the light of
locative media, I found very interesting. I wonder whether the term is
still appropriate as site, in relation to a mobile device, can become
such a fleeting moment, that it no longer needs to be defined as site.
rather, the media facilitates a mobility-specific art. And - as it is
dependent on particular infrastructures (satellites, telephone masts,
etc) - it is also infrastructure-specific.

as there has been mobility-specific art probably for as long as there
has been the desire to dissolve the art object itself, and as the art
does not reside in the gadget itself, the activity that involves the
gadget comes into focus (movement ++). there is also the question of
being puppetstrung to some satellite system when using gps which has
less to do with site than with network/infrastructure. the whole
situation changes when the infrastructure fails, ie. the satellite
signal cannot be picked up, or the telephone network has not been
extended to, say, some underground car park, or dense forest. the
position of the artist with a mobile device is a dependent one.

Naomi's claim that the conceptual artists in the 20th century were safe
in the gallery is simply not true, as the various cases of Hans
Haacke's conflicts with museums show. Artists from that period were the
ones opening up expanded notions of art practice: Franz Erhart Walter's
'erweiterter Werkbegriff', or more so Beuys' 'erweiterter Kunstbegriff'
and 'soziale Skulptur' are positions that are precursors to a continued
practice that exists outside normal gallery exhibitions. In
contemporary art, WochenKlausur in Austria, or Tim Rollins + KOS in New
York (or even works such as Clegg & Guttmann's "Open Public Library"),
are engaged in a practice of art in relation to society rather than as
a comodity. The impact these artists' projects have had are directly
affecting the lives of people - without complicity with gallery
systems, but appropriating it for socially engaged work. Rirkrit
Tiravanija, who may or may not be complicit with gallery systems, often
affects the givens of public galleries with his installations, when
people can access them 24hrs, or use as homeless shelters. How does
that relate to the use of a device that depends on a commercial
infrastructure, or satellites; complicit with the festival system, if I
may add?

The museum is not the stage for Locatists, Naomi writes, (as if the
museum is the only natural home for art), it is the world: but
essentially you are only placing the accepted values of 'artist' onto
the locative practitioner, so that in the end nothing will have
changed. The world becomes a gigantic museum. To paraphrase Beuys once
again, the silence of the GPS is meaningless. As long as the
understanding of what art is, and can be, is still only one of awe and
display (as in: 'Look how great the hacking locatives, look how dumb
the male genius spraying painter.'), it doesn't matter whether art is
then called art, media, or rat: it is still a boring hierarchical
system of tops (in your case Hackers, Activists & Locatists) and
bottoms (Artist, Webartists) that is only about its own greatness but
not about giving something (meaning, community, etc) to a puzzling
world.

Jorn