Hi list
A forward from the IDC list (on Collaboration) hosted by Trebor Scholz 
and others.
No mention of the exhibition! Young nothings you are welcome here! 
Chime in!
-Sarah

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Judith Rodenbeck <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 5 October 2005 12:22:18 BST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [iDC] REFRESH! conference, some impressions
>
>
> To the idc list:
>  
> I’ve just come back from “REFRESH! The First International Conference 
> on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” in Banff. 
> Hrewith some brief impressions of the conference.
>  
> I am an art historian (and ex-performance/video artist, from the 
> Studio for Interrelated Media at Mass Art) with a longstanding but 
> hitherto relatively untapped interest in new media. My own field of 
> expertise is performance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including 
> Fluxus projects, but I also teach on the early part of the 20th 
> century and am currently leading an advanced seminar on what I call 
> “mechanical transcriptions of the real”—that is, following Kittler, 
> those analog copying technologies that have so defined 20th century 
> experience and inflected much of its art. I attended the conference as 
> an observer, trying to learn more about the subject. What follows is 
> merely a report, but it comes filtered through that complex of 
> interests & preoccupations.
>  
> The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously ambitious 
> conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with 
> panels and events the overall distribution of which, in terms of 
> topics and time, I thought was pretty good, given the mission. 
> Sessions ranged from “media histories” to a session on “collaborative 
> practice/networking” to “history of institutions”; there were 3 
> keynote addresses—Edmond Couchot, Sarat Maharaj, and Lucia Santaella; 
> a poster session; an optional hike (Banff is in the stunning Canadian 
> Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und so weiter. Meals were 
> had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, and at least for me, 
> since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt like what one 
> snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became interesting 
> moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. While things 
> did tend to split out into the old pros and the young nothings, they 
> did get a bit more productively mixed up on occasion. Before I launch 
> into the problems with the conference, the feeling I got from those I 
> spoke with was that it was a mixed success but a success overall. I do 
> think the conference provided a very good starting point for 
> something, and this seemed especially true after the final session.
>  
> High points of the conference, in no particular order:
> 	• 	Mario Carpo’s paper on architecture in the age of digital 
> reproducibility, which dealt with the shift from a simply additive to 
> an algorithmic modularity in architecture. This was probably the most 
> professionally delivered paper at the conference, as well as the most 
> intelligently amusing, and what Carpo presented as a paradigmatic 
> slide was fascinating, provocative. I learned something.
> 	• 	Philip Thurtle and Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier 
> doing solo for brainwaves. I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, 
> but was thrilled to see the footage and to have the piece presented.
> 	• 	Chris Salter on a history of performance with media, beginning 
> with a fantastically forceful evocation of Russian Constructivis 
> plays. I teach this material, but Salter’s presentation was vigorous 
> and made a very strong case for its inclusion in a “new media” 
> history.
> 	• 	Christiane Paul on curatorial issues with new media. This was also 
> a very professional (by which I mean good, clear, to the point) 
> presentation and very usefully laid out the difficulties involved, 
> from curators having to rebuild settings to house work to problems of 
> bitrot to audience development. Impressive and useful.
> 	• 	Machiko Kusahara on “device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. 
> This was an art historically thin paper—no discussion of Fluxus, very 
> loose mention of Gutai and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the 
> “painting machines” of her husband—but the presentation of a different 
> value-system for Japanese “device art” (gizmos whose “art coefficient” 
> is activated by their use) was pretty convincing as well as very 
> thought-provoking.
> 	• 	tour of the labs AND, surprisingly, the poster session, which was 
> cluttered and weird but also the one moment in the conference when 
> people really talked to each other’s ideas
> 	• 	Tim Druckrey’s screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very 
> lazy but passionate paper, basically asking why on earth new media 
> would want to be included in an old canon, and noting that a far 
> bigger problem is present in Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational 
> aesthetics” than in the October cabal’s control of high theory.
> 	• 	Michael Naimark’s corporatist but useful analysis of the 
> sustainability of new media institutions.
> 	• 	Johannes Goebel’s passionate and pragmatic overview of two such 
> institutions.
> 	• 	the final, quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara 
> Diamond. This was where most of the lingering meta-issues were put on 
> the table, and it was done in such a way that those in the room I 
> think felt it was really a high point and a great note on which to 
> finish. Left the feeling that while there is work to be done it will 
> be done.
>  
> I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there were 
> good things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on 
> cybernetics was excellent, for instance.
>  
> That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor 
> Scholz and Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial 
> structure in which moderators also delivered papers within the format 
> of a way over-tight schedule and with virtually no time for questions; 
> a few speakers went beyond their alotted minutes in the first sessions 
> and then panels were policed to an almost draconian degree, making the 
> entire assembly tense. Discussions were notably truncated. In fact, to 
> this art historian it seemed weird that people would gather for a 
> conference on something as shifting and relatively openly defined as 
> “new media” (how many papers in fact began with loose attempts to list 
> the salient features of new media) and then sit and hear something 
> they could have read already… for though the organizers had posted 
> quite a number of papers on their official website beforehand, it was 
> clear that most attendees hadn’t read those papers… and then not 
> discuss what they had heard.
>  
> What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of 
> anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art” 
> categorized as “art” or as “new media,” these inflected many of the 
> panel presentations and discussions, and not in a productive way. Part 
> of the problem, as Andreas Broeckman pointed out in the final crit 
> session, was that the mission of the conference was probably too 
> broadly and vaguely defined. But what I heard over and over again was 
> “traditional art history” can’t deal with new media. The first thing 
> I’d want to know is, what precisely is “traditional art history”? From 
> Simon Penny’s castigation of art history as racist, imperialist, 
> classist, etc., it sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian 
> connoisseurship; this seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only 
> the most vigorous and politically thought-through of a frequent 
> plaint. Yet while he was quite right to note that cultural studies 
> wasn’t mentioned once at the conference his characterization of art 
> history is way behind the times. Art history and new media share 
> Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, Rudolf Arnheim; new media 
> people would do well to read Panofsky and Warburg, just as I and at 
> least some of my colleagues read Weiner and Kittler. Art history may 
> not yet be able to deal with new media, but perhaps it is also the 
> case that new media doesn’t know how to deal with art history.
>  
> On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark 
> Hansen, whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the 
> new media theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its 
> lack of recognition by art history and then its savaging of same (“we 
> want to be with you; we hate you” or “I love you; go away”) it might 
> be more productive to stage a genuine encounter. Leaving aside Andreas 
> Broeckman, who gave a very nice but grossly amputated (ran out of 
> time) presentation on aesthetics and new media, and the truly awful 
> presentation comparing the websites of the Louvre and the Hermitage, 
> the art historians who were at the conference were either working with 
> medieval Islamic art or with the visual culture of science. That is, 
> there were no art historians dealing with contemporary art who were 
> not already part of the inner circle of new media people; yet this is 
> precisely the encounter that needs to be staged. Meanwhile Mark Tribe, 
> not an art historian, gave an extremely art historically lame 
> presentation on appropriation, and while the broader point was, well, 
> okay, his presentation of the historical material was painful and for 
> at least this listener undermined his credibility. (On the other hand, 
> Cornelius Borck, a historian of medicine, gave a terrific 
> presentation—historically nuanced, intelligently read, and carefully 
> researched—on the optophone of Raoul Hausman and Hausman’s complicated 
> relationship to prosthesis.) From my perspective this suggests a 
> serious problem of disciplinarity: surely just as new media 
> artists/theorists expect a sophisticated treatment from art historians 
> (Simon Penny again: art historians should learn engineering, cognitive 
> science, neuroscience before they discuss new media…) so new media 
> artists and theorists should treat the work that comes before—both art 
> and media—with the historical complexity (without going to Pennyian 
> excess) art history at its best demonstrates.
>  
> Other issues that came up:
> 	• 	Problems of storage & retrieval of new media work. From an 
> historical point of view this demonstrates a remarkable degree of 
> self-consciousness on the part of new new media—something new, 
> incidentally, in the longer history of media, and interesting as a 
> phenomenon.
> 	• 	Huge anxiety about the “art” status of new media, alongside a 
> subthematic of the relation to science and to scientific models of 
> research.
> 	• 	Adulatory fetishizing of cognitive science, engineering, and 
> neuroscience (in marked contrast to the dissing of art history).
> 	• 	Lack of a fixed definition of new media, with repeated nods to 
> hybridization, bodily engagement, non-hierarchical structure, 
> networking, and so on.
> 	• 	Disconnect of the keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with 
> English and seemed, while emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from 
> another time. Sarat Maharaj rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf 
> Arnheim and the Other; I found this talk excruciating, though I later 
> spoke with someone (media artist, go figure) for whom it had been a 
> high point. And Lucia Santaella’s beautifully delivered, rigorously 
> near-hallucinatory and religious but to me quasi-apocalyptic vision of 
> the “semiotic” and “post-human” present/future of the “exo-brain” was 
> a chilling picture of species-death.
> 	• 	Ongoing problem of gender and geographic distribution. While 
> non-Western topics cropped up here and there at the conference, the 
> one panel that dealt in any extended way with non-Western paradigms 
> was also the one panel that was almost all female—and also the panel 
> that got the most flak in its few minutes of discussion, in part 
> because most of those dealing with non-Western paradigms were Western. 
> This relegation of dealing with the Other to the women is typical. 
> There was also some grumbling that many of the non-Western projects 
> had been tucked into the poster session rather than elevated to panel 
> status. It would have been good to have some representation from 
> Africa, or even a panel on doing new media in less media-rich 
> environments than Euro-Ameri-Nippon.
> 	• 	Comical reliance on and then debate about Powerpoint…. And then, 
> as one member of the audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at 
> the conference in their ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little 
> glowing apples at their desks. No sign of Linux.
>  
> That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone interested 
> in more specific information about the conference to check the website 
> at www.mediaarthistory.org, which has some papers up as well as 
> abstracts.
>  
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