Before the month is over and a different discussion starts, I wanted to
mention something that Gerhard Dirmoser pointed out in the presentations
of his work during Ars Electronica and also referred to in his post to
this list. He said that as he was arranging the material, he considered
starting from the point of "media art" (in the center of the circle of the
Memory Theater), but then started simply from art ("art as ...") in order
to look at Ars Electronica in terms of its claims - throughout the entire
25 years - of being a "Festival for Art, Technology and Society".

If you look at his study
(http://www.servus.at/kontext/ARS/ars_cluster_E_1_1.ppt.pdf), you will
notice little grey boxes distributed throughout the sections, which
indicate important technical developments. Looking at the works and
projects in the vicinity of these boxes, it is noticeable that ideas were
often present and implemented in rudimentary ways, which later became more
prominent and attracted attention as "new media" works. Because the Memory
Theater is not based on a timeline, these affinities are more striking. As
Gerhard has already pointed out in his post, the study - just by its
structure - calls into question what is "new", what is "media art" or
"digital art", etc.

The Memory Theater is not intended to be a categorization of art works,
however. It is based on a technique from the Renaissance and is analogous
to Aby Warburg's arrangements of pictures, but using text material. The
text material used in this study offers a point of access to the AEC
database (http://www.aec.at/en/archives/). As the detail studies show
(they are all derived from the Memory Theater study, but only the Memory
Theater has been translated into English), there are a number of different
possible ways of approaching the body of material that this database
comprises. What most fascinates me personally about the Memory Theater -
not only in the study of 25 Years of Ars Electronica, but also in the
previous studies of the history of performance art and the study of verbs
(http://www.servus.at/kontext/ARS/weitere_Studien/) - is the way it
reveals sometimes surprising connections and affinities through the
principle of proximity.

The study doesn't actually answer any of the questions raised in this
discussion, but as I generally tend to find questions more interesting
than answers, I think that must be someone else's job anyway.
Aileen