Hi all,
I am Rudolf Frieling, researcher at ZKM Karlsruhe and currently at Banff
like a few of us. We have gone through three intensive days and have
finished the conference with a constructive debate already about Refresh
2, which might take place in Berlin in 2007. Maybe we all feel that the
best thing about this conference was the fact that it actually took place
and that it gathered so many people active in this field. Having said
this, it is difficult to make a general statement but I will venture with
a few remarks that might lead to such a discussion.
The subtitle to this month's discussion, "process or product", seems a
deliberate provocation since no one would consider "product" an option in
the discussion. The processual nature of the debate is obvious. So one of
the most consistent complaints was the lack of time for discussions. It is
not enough to see a series of rushed papers, i.e. products....
Secondly, the nature of this event, its scope and direction, was the focus
of another debate, and highly indicative of an insecurity as to the
formulation of a frame for the next conference. Is it going to concentrate
on new frontiers beyond the old histories, told already again and again,
or is it necessary to tell these histories from a larger variety of
viewpoints, including specifically the larger communities of art and
science history? The notion of "new" media was contested more than once.
The playful allusion to this through the Banff exhibition title that Sarah
and Steve came up with - "The Art Formerly Known as New Media" - is
picking up on an important issue: we have had enough discourses going on
about media vs. new media, one technology vs. another one etc. These
dualistic discussions have worn out and what remains is the need and urge
to discuss more in detail specific projects with respect to their
(multiple) contexts that need not be technologically driven (although they
can be). Discussing "ART" as opposed to "MEDIA ART" is an age-old topic
that we don't have to perpetuate in infinity. The most productive result
of this conference for me was exactly this: that we all shared the need to
go beyond the boundaries of the inner circle of media art. I felt thankful
for the contributions by scholars such as Barbara Stafford and Gunalan
Nadarajan for this reason.

Best
Rudolf



> There are 3 messages totalling 224 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
>   1. Histories of curating new media art - process or product? Oct theme
> (2)
>   2. Museums and Galleries: Resources for Teaching and Research
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sat, 1 Oct 2005 09:55:12 +1000
> From:    Anna Munster <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Histories of curating new media art - process or product? Oct
> theme
>
> Hi to this list, which I've been lurking on for a few months and
> haven't posted as yet so it's a long one!
>
> I'm also from The College of Fine Arts (Andy Polaine's current
> institutional residence) but locked inside the theory cell ;-). I'd
> love to be in Banff right now but am actually in Australia writing
> grants, writing books, designing a cross-signal processing installation
> and thinking a lot about curating and new media. Although I've written
> about and made new media work, I haven't as yet curated it but I'm
> thinking about having  a go at that in the near future.
>
> I wanted to respond to a couple of points from Sarah's and Andy's
> posts. First, the digest that Sarah gave of Mark Hansen's paper.
> Perhaps its unfair to attack someone I'm not directly listening to but
> I am familiar with his work and it sounds like a number of arguments
> that lead on from New Philosophy for New Media. I have two problems
> with this. First, while granted Refresh is an art history conference
> and granted that Krauss is a BIG art historian, I find it little more
> than a textual exercise to engage her work in order to point out what
> she doesn't do for  new media aesthetics. It seems to me patently clear
> that one doesn't have to argue for new media making a break with this
> kind of art history (ie the torturous kind). But the point has been
> made by a dozen other writers (Manovich etc) that certain aspects of
> new media - including its investment in 'the novel' also repeat a
> refrain from the history of modernist aesthetics. I fail to see what
> the big deal is in allowing new media to be both partly produced
> through a series of art historical genealogies and also partly doing
> something different. It is completely possible to hold these two
> positions with respect to new media aesthetics at the one time.
>
> Second, I really wish Hansen would talk about new media and not video
> art - ie Douglas Gordon and Bill Viola. I'm fine with an expansive
> understanding of the field and even with an argument that what Gordon
> and Viola do with video is newish (at the time they did it) or that
> there are a range of aesthetic practices shared between time-based art
> and other new media forms. However, I think it would do Hansen the
> world of good to actually get out there and have a look at what is
> currently being made in the world. Perhaps North America is not the
> best place for this - ie for the amazing stuff that people are doing
> with new media technologies, although if you dig a little deeper,
> there's some interesting stuff (wow - Jordan Crandell, Trebor Scholz,
> Alex Galloway, Drew Hemmett, Natalie Jeremijenko etc etc etc).
>
> I'd be interested to hear what Erkki Huhtamo had to say - I think he
> has a much better grip on the interesting aspects of new media, artists
> and the relation of new media to histories of technology and popular
> culture.
>
> Sarah, I think you are right in suggesting that curatorial work can
> perform extremely interesting genealogies. There's a very interesting
> show on in Melbourne, Australia at the moment called "White Noise" at
> the Australian Centre for the Moving Image curated by Mike Stubbs. This
> show connects the work of contemporary digital artists with earlier
> interest in the materiality of medium and the corporeality of
> perception that coursed through early media arts and also through
> abstraction (unfortunately both Hansen and Krauss ignore or make very
> little of this connection). It's one of the most focussed, historically
> interesting and refreshing shows I've seen around digital art work for
> quite a while. It both draws the historical connections and allows the
> digital work to take up these refrains in new ways - how do the eyes of
> contemporary viewers, for example, physically react to and perceive
> streaming data?
>
> Andy wrote:
> Finally, and this is something I'd like to address to Beryl, some of
> the more interesting interactive work is happening outside the gallery,
> in retail, public-space (non-art spaces, specifically), videogames in
> lounge rooms, mobile phones on the bus, etc. When they're taken out of
> context and put in the gallery they become more like museum objects -
> the equivalent to anthropological trophies in glass cabinets. The real
> experience of contemporary interactivity is not in the gallery. So,
> should we still bother to put them in there?
>
> Perhaps this was not intentional but I detect a division here between
> the gallery and 'the rest of the world' ie home, leisure, work etc. I
> really think that many people using new media who also call themselves
> artists have in fact created their own 'zone' as Timothy Druckery calls
> it, which exists in a kind of third arena that takes into account
> aspects of the gallery and of 'the rest of the world'. I'm really
> referring here to everything encompassed by the arena of new media
> oriented festivals (transmediale, DEF etc) to more process oriented
> events such as electrofringe in Australia to vjing, podcasting,
> collaborative and networked projects such as Sarai's OPUS and so on.
> These are collective and social events/deployments of new media. In
> that sense they take the idea (if not the actual practice) of the
> public sphere, which in the case of traditional art is still connected
> to the gallery as the milieu for experimentation with new media. But
> they also refuse the closure that the institution of the gallery brings
> - its architecture, production of a certain kind of public, its
> relation to a privatised art market and/or the occasional commission.
> So these kind of new media artists are making their own artistic spaces
> that are neither gallery nor 'rest of world'.  I'm not suggesting that
> retail or users and their mobiles don't produce interesting experiments
> with new media. But I am suggesting that these are mainly privatised (
> and that is not a judgment, just a description).
>
> What I think artistic practice and experimentation in new media has to
> offer right now when, globally, social and collective space are being
> seriously eroded, is these other 'zones' of networked and social space.
> This is what seems to me to be new about the use of media - not just
> new aesthetics, new technologies but new spheres. Interestingly enough,
> these seem to curate themselves!
>
> cheers
> Anna Munster
>
>
>
> Dr. Anna Munster
> Senior Lecturer
> Post-Graduate Coordinator
> School of Art History and Theory,
> College of Fine Arts
> University of NSW
> P.O Box 259
> Paddington, 2021
> NSW
> Australia
> ph: 612 9385 0741
> fx: 612 9385 0615
> CRICOS Provider code 00098G
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:00:48 +0200
> From:    Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Museums and Galleries: Resources for Teaching and Research
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> Two weeks ago, I sent a research request for books and articles on
> museums and galleries. Several more have come in since I posted the
> compilation here. I have also received requests for permission to
> reprint, distribute, or use the compilation.
>
> This compilation is a community resource -- 41 authors have joined to
> develop it. I have now made a carefully formatted, easy-to-print .pdf
> version of the compilation. If you wish a copy, please send an email
> to me at
>
> <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Please place the words "Museums and Galleries" in the subject header:
>
> Subject Museums and Galleries
>
> You will have a copy of the .pdf document by return email.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
> --
>
> Ken Friedman
> Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
> Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
> Norwegian School of Management
>
> Design Research Center
> Denmark's Design School
>
> email: [log in to unmask]
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sat, 1 Oct 2005 18:57:42 +0100
> From:    Sarah Cook <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Histories of curating new media art - process or product? Oct
> theme
>
> Hi Anna and all
> thanks for your comments. I should point out that I only reported on
> the first quarter of Mark's talk as it pertained to this month's
> theme... it was a far more extensive paper than a criticism of the
> writing of art history and Mark proposed a number of ways of thinking
> about new media - about the deployment of the body in relation to the
> work (i.e. cinema is immobile, new media art isn't), about time and
> temporality (i.e. art used to be about the separation of the present of
> seeing with the present of making, new media is about creating the
> experience of temporality). While I agree that I would like to see a
> wider range of examples, Mark did talk extensively about Thecla
> Schiphort's BodyMaps interactive table and the work of Philippe Parreno
> and Pierre Huyghe (which leads me to a whole other rant about
> Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and theories of post-production and
> its misapprehension of new media art, but never mind that for now).
> I should ask Eddie Shanken or Charlie Gere, two of this month's invited
> respondents, or indeed other crumb lurkers here in Banff to report on
> Erkki's talk and the others (those of you not in Banff could perhaps
> indicate which talks you most want to hear about...) but in the
> meantime I can say that so far today (in a magically and freshly snowy
> landscape) there is a lot of food for thought. I am noticing an
> increasingly widely adopted criticism of Lev Manovich's historical
> grounding of new media in the cinematic (Ron Burnett --
> http://www.mediaarthistory.org/navbar-links/Biographies/
> burrnett_bio.htm -- just commented that for Manovich new is not just an
> escape from history but suggests history isn't important). And there is
> much talk of the archive but little talk of the failure of it. Just as
> after last night's keynote
> (http://www.mediaarthistory.org/navbar-links/Biographies/
> maharaj_abstract.htm) there was much talk of the delights of theory and
> delivery but less of the content imparted.
> As for Anna's comment about the show in Australia, yesterday Andreas
> said that what is of interest in the break between digital aesthetics
> and analogue aesthetics is that the understanding of digital aesthetics
> hinges on technicality of production...  and that it may be better to
> spend time thinking about the experiential qualities of art, and
> identify the qualities of its reception.
> as Jon Winet would say, Onward!
> Sarah
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of NEW-MEDIA-CURATING Digest - 30 Sep 2005 to 1 Oct 2005 (#2005-160)
> ************************************************************************
>
>
>