The latest issue of Art Lies Contemporary Art Journal (issue 67)  
deals with the digital divide and has an article by Beryl and I which  
updates some of the examples in our recent publication Rethinking  
Curating: Art After New Media (MIT, 2010). Please seek out a copy,  
not least for the great illustrations!

http://www.artlies.org/article.php?id=1940&issue=67&s=0


Editor's introduction:

This issue of Art Lies catches our journal in an exciting moment of  
expansion between the printed publication you are holding and its  
potential virtual, digital, Web, Net, online, screen-based or social  
media complement. Enamored by the engagement of both pulp and pixels,  
Art Lies is refreshing itself as a more dynamic online and print  
periodical.
Starting with this issue, dubbed “The New Flesh,” you’ll find  
original online features posted regularly at Artlies.org.  
Commissioned in concert with the printed publication, these articles,  
as well as curatorial and artist projects, extend Issue No. 67’s  
“conversation” materially and temporally, across media platforms and  
over a multi-month timeline. Appropriately, we’ve turned this issue’s  
print (and Web) pages to this very topic: How are artists, curators,  
dealers and writers navigating the divide between virtual and  
traditional media?

The Web undeniably invites new forms of artistic production, display  
and criticism, but as the Internet grows increasingly mainstream, how  
is this promise being met? Fresh digital spaces should lead to  
opportunities for more and new voices, as well as inventive and  
unorthodox structures, logics, systems and experiences. Yet, in  
practice—as every museum, gallery, and artist (of any generation)  
generates a website and Facebook presence—do they? Does the Web  
transcend daily experience and escape the trappings of “meatspace,”  
or do online media merely offer new flesh for old concerns? The  
Amazon Kindle and other e-readers that digitally approximate the  
printed page would suggest that as much as we adapt to technological  
invention, we also adapt and retrofit innovation to our traditions,  
habits and locales. Progress, more often than not, must double back  
in order to advance.

Addressing such concerns in Issue No. 67, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook  
propose critical acceptance for new media work by defining it in  
terms of analog experience and art historical precedent. A survey of  
arts writers Paddy Johnson, Kelly Klaasmeyer, Tom Moody and Lauren  
O’Neill-Butler indicates that writing on the Web may have already  
achieved a status quo on par with its predecessors. Considering the  
new online publication East of Borneo, Andrew Berardini describes its  
promise in relation to a singular geographic and cultural place, Los  
Angeles. For artists, the Web increasingly offers not a virtual  
unknown or ideal but, rather, a compromise between the familiar and  
unfamiliar, a hybrid space increasingly more normal than new.

Tobias Leingruber explains the Web’s potential through real-world  
spatial metaphors, while Kristin Lucas inverts this mirror,  
understanding her self through technology’s logics. Kari Altmann  
digitally excavates the deteriorating landscape of contemporary tech,  
while a discussion between Cliff Evans and Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung  
reanimates the original act of media appropriation—photomontage. It  
should be of little surprise, then, that Joel Holmberg and Guthrie  
Lonergan’s mythologizing tale of the Internet artist ends in a return  
to the printed page.

Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio revisit the hidden,  
interactive messaging of a Mad magazine fold-in. A special insert by  
Susan Silton also enhances the issue with a postcard project  
addressing (public) persuasion and perception. Finally, in the  
reviews section you’ll notice two new headers. Taking our criticism  
pages beyond exhibition reviews to individual practices and art  
objects, Art Lies now features “Subject Matter,” an essay on a single  
artist, and “Object Lesson,” an essay on a single work of art. As the  
artists and writers contributing to Issue No. 67 bridge Internet and  
offline zones, Art Lies also begins to venture across media,  
approaching these platforms not as surfaces but as connective tissues  
and substantive spaces for critical thought and action.

— Kurt Mueller, Interim Editor