>
Andreas said:
> i also said that whatever is 'new' about 'new media' is what is the 
> least interesting for art. can the 'newness' of apparatuses or other 
> techniques really be a relevant criterion for study and cultural 
> engagement? (this implies that this engagement, and the scholarship, 
> becomes obsolete when the device loses its newness?) and does it make 
> sense to use the blanket term 'new media' without clarifying, at 
> least, whether you mean one of the many, many technical 
> manifestations, or one of a set of theories, or one of the many forms 
> of 'new media art'?

I agree that the term 'new media' has many problems (some of which you 
outline above). I am not so much invested in the newness part of the 
term.
And, as Darko has pointed out, this discussion has been debated on many 
lists and symposia etc over the last decade.

>  is it in any way satisfying, or sufficient, if Anna positions herself 
> by saying, 'I've written about and made new media work'?

It is perhaps not sufficient (but nonetheless satisfactory for me ;-) 
to use the term new media. I'm not so worried about its ontological 
status  - I'm more interested in what people do with the term.  I want 
to make a plea for the contextual and located relevance of using such a 
term. In Australia, for example, the term during the 1990s came to be 
associated with and hence to identify a zone verging on a community of 
practice and artists. This is partly to do with experimentation with 
media and technologies, which Andy has pointed out is a vital aspect of 
the areas under discussion. However, the term 'new media' s in 
Australia has also been associated for artist (since the 1990s) with 
finance. An important funding body for a variety of artists from 
interactive to database to immersive to bioart has provided financial 
support and was called  "The New Media Arts Board". It's interesting 
that its recent disbanding is part of a global and post-dotcom 
withdrawal of state and venture capital from the art-tech sphere. But 
its presence was part of a regional history of new media arts in 
Australasia.

So, one thing people were doing with the term new media art, in 
Australia, was to finance their art practices and to also build an 
emerging set of artistic experiments. I am interested in the 
contextualised use of terms and their history, rather than their 
attempts to be all encompassing. These kind of situated practices and 
histories often do more for thinking through what it is that  art is 
doing - economically, politically, culturally - historically and in the 
present, than umbrella descriptions of a field. (I am thinking here of 
the kind of approach that Mathew Fuller, for example, uses in thinking 
through what software does, rather than what it is).

I am also wondering if there is more at stake in a European context to 
draw a continuity between digital aesthetics and media arts? There may 
well be very important aesthetic and political gains to be made by 
doing so.

>  - in the early 1970s, 'new media' meant 'video'. - how productive is 
> it to make such a shifting signifier as 'new' a cornerstone of one's 
> thinking about art and media cultural practice?

Historically speaking, one can make this claim, as you have Andreas, 
about  the status of video in the '70s. However, the term 'new media' 
was not widely deployed to talk about or make or identify video, then. 
Nonetheless, the word 'media' was often mentioned. When we criticize 
the term new media, its the new that always gets questioned - and, 
understandably. However, there is also no one 'media arts'. Where the 
media was in the '70s and where it is today are very different. Mass 
media has become more concentrated, more monopolized in terms of its 
political economy and simultaneously more diversified, multiplied in 
terms of form and audience. New media arts has a number of interesting 
directions which intervene into the dialectic of the media scape under 
post-Fordist capital. But the kind of interventions undertaken are also 
different from the kinds performed by early and 'new' video art, for 
example.

Last point for this post, likewise art history is not one but sets of 
competing and contradictory approaches. Various of its frameworks have 
nothing interesting to say about digital aesthetics. And I am horrified 
at the proposition that was also mentioned in a recent post about 
Refresh!  on this list that its more conservative proponents want to 
make a 'canon' out of new media art! That is nothing more than 
institutionalised disciplinary formation. Other related theoretical 
fields such as visual culture, art and cultural theory, new media 
theory and digital aesthetics can take an historical approach to art 
and also contribute to the production of new aesthetic directions - not 
making decisions about what to put in and exclude from the 'museum' of 
art history.

Andy - if you get to this part - I'd have to say, then, that while art 
theory must engage with art making (and any other cultural productions 
of new technologies) its purpose is not to tell practioners why they 
make what they make. Theory is also a practice - although often it 
struts around as a disengaged one.

cheers
Anna
>

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