The following post has little or nothing to do with this months theme,
appologies for that, but I wanted to send this excerpt to Crumb
for a while already and had to wait until it was published. I like
Peter Luining's emphasis on comparing new media art works to non media
interactive works. The interview has the compelling title 'Art is a
Software Plug In' which is no quote, for as far as I know, so I am
kind of wondering why it was chosen... Luining did make some Photoshop
Plug Ins based on different views of philosophers, so maybe thoughts
were flying... The interview was made by Thomas Petersen.
whole interview: http://www.artificial.dk/articles/luining.htm
Q: These problems are often made out to being rooted in
the first circuit - i.e. the traditional art world not
being able or ready to accept electronic/digital art
works, thus excluding electronic and digital artworks
from recent (mainstream) art history.
I am not going to point fingers. The fact is that nowadays
there are specialized new media institutes and they make it
easier for (mainstream) institutions to leave anything that
looks too complex or difficult to those specialized
institutes. And with too complex or difficult I don't mean
only technology wise but also regarding the character of
the artwork. A simple example of this is what happened to
me a few years ago, when I did a quite simple interactive
installation that consisted of a moving set of blocks
projected on a large screen that could be manipulated by a
mouse. At the opening a quite popular Dutch art critic came
in and was terribly excited, but after I explained that the
work was interactive and you could change the work yourself,
he swiftly moved on. I only can guess his motives, but the
most important thing, I think, is the problematic notion of
the author in this kind of work. This is because when you
start to play, who's the author?
And when you start to think about this it becomes even more
complex. If for example you compare it with the notions of
interactivity you can find at performances, you will find out
that computer interactivity is different. You interact with
software that is programmed by an artist. This has even more
difficult implications than a performance where performer and
audience interact and can make an artwork together. In this
sense it's important to place this work in a context in which,
besides digital artists, also more 'traditional' artists like
Rirkrit Tiravanija are working. With the work of this accepted
artist you also see a shift in concepts of interactivity. I
remember a piece by him that was just a music band rehearsal
room, and people just started to play and use the instruments.
It wasn't cleaned so for every newcomer to this space things
could have been changed from the original setting.
Q: In your opinion, what is needed for the traditional art world
circuit to deal more with computer based artworks?
A serious discourse that deals with aesthetic/ formalist
questions of computer based artworks. The problem so far has
been that computer based work was presented in 'institutional'
art spaces because it was hot, new, etc. But because of a lack
of any serious discourse or critics placing these works in a
wider art context, the hype was over in no time. Furthermore,
as lots of traditional art institutions jumped on the bandwagon
to show computer art, hardly any of them thought of how to
present these works. And maybe here also artists (including
myself) can be blamed. A computer screen and mouse was enough,
while you could criticize this way of presentation, especially
from the side that loads of interactive computer works are just
too complex to experience in a white cube.
So when talking about computer art I'm not only talking about
a discourse but also about a mentality of the artist. I think
an artist, if s/he is interested in showing her/his work in an
institutional art space, the first thing s/he should think of
is the way how the work should be presented. Having learned
from seeing people trying to interact with others' and with my
work, I decided to do presentations and performances with my work.
My latest step is making screen movies of work, with sound, that
just explain or tell what happens on the screen. In this sense
I see myself working in the tradition of 70s conceptualists who
did their art outside the institutional spaces, as for example
Robert Smithson's Spiral Getty, but showed clear documents (that
are artworks themselves) of these works inside the institutions.
In my case the internet is of course the outside.
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