I can imagine those who knew me as a media artist would suspect I have
gone senile in my old age now that I am working with something as old
fashioned as a monorail view camera and silver gelatin prints but I am
beginning see that this approach works rather well with media arts
aesthetics I was working with some 20 years ago.
First, there is the traditional exhibition in an art gallery, of let us
say, 20 odd prints. Then there could be an art book printed with
duo-tones on matte coated paper along with the BBQ verse I am writing
which I had first planned as computer multimedia. And then a website
with low res jpegs and again the verse text. The possibility of spoken
words also exists, given the break with Hegel's aesthetics involved. The
difficulty of combining verse with visual graphics is not that these two
different media are not compatible but rather that the media demand
their own understandings which take up their own times. Visual arts and
poetry have very different relations to their histories which in working
with different media need to be accommodated.
Does this seem possible? It does seem to me that this reconfigures media
arts in a quite different way to what the current art school versions
provide. And I should be able to define media arts in the way I see,
which seems somewhat to go against the supposed conceptual art base of
media art and without denying the collaborative nature of media arts,
since collaboration happens as much historically and this list also
provides a collaborative intersection. Moments of conceptual art breaks
art with the privileged painting model beginning in 17th century
continental Europe. From cave walls to computer graphics is not the
history of painting as a metonyn for art and its history.
Seems to push media arts also beyond the technological determinism idea
which returns to painting as history of art for its authority. How to
negotiate poetry as a privileged literature also seems to get dragged
into this.
Anyway, comments welcome... Chris Jones.
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