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Dear List, As I often am, I’m humbled by just how smart the people on this list are, and how generous with their knowledge. As we run up to conference, here’s a stab at another running summary, and first a comment about the aims of the conference: Armin Medosch rightly pointed out the tension between wanting the specific history and phenomenological differences of new media art to be understood, and wanting not to be overlooked by the mainstream, and that’s a tension that CRUMB has often explored. Our tactics have often been to build bridges between what might be familiar to general contemporary art curators (live art, conceptual art, activist art) and defining what might be truly different about new media, thus trying to avoid what Matt Fuller has called “cut and paste conceptualism”. I hope we’ve tried to do this with this conference, we have invited both general contemporary art curators, and new media specialists and asked them to find common ground, as well as very accurately define areas of difference, in order to understand where new knowledge must be applied. I’m really impressed how knowledge from the different fields of live art, performance, and video are being tested against new media art here, and hopefully that will also happen at the conference. I’m particularly grateful to Sarah for posting her summary, and to Curt Cloninger for posting his ‘9 kinds of time’ – these accurate definitions and categories of time are very useful indeed. In an attempt to summarise recent posts and to map Curt’s typology onto the concerns of the conference, I’ve arranged these under some headings which embrace the subjective: TIME AND THE AUDIENCE Curt: >1. The time it takes the actual media art object to play out (as Jon Thompson noted -- a decaying sculpture, a perpetually updated data cloud). Smithson's work really problematizes this kind of time. The art collective Spurse has been exploring "deep time/rapid time," considering geological formations over time. Also categorically problematic is aleatoric software (like Brian Eno's "77 Million Paintings") which perpetually runs with enough generative variability to keep from ever "looking" like the same thing twice (although arguably it is performing the same perpetual function at an algorithmic level). Curt: >2. The Cartesian clock time that the discrete viewer/user actually spends viewing/interacting with the work in the space (three seconds, 30 minutes, or whatever). Curt: >3. The more subjective Bergsonian time (analog, non-digital, qualitative not quantitative) that the discrete viewer spends affectively experiencing the work (could involve personal prior memories, could involve the work coming to mind later after leaving the space). This is related to the Cartesian clock time, but by no means solely determined by it. Issues of audience are consistent areas of ‘difference’ for new media art, especially if the audience takes on the role of participant, or even curator. This can be a challenge to general contemporary art curators, who may have been content to leave any ideas of audience, affect or experiential concerns to the education department. Curators may even have great suspicion of, or distain for anything concerning ‘audience studies’. Lizzie Muller is one of the few people to have formally studied artists’ intent, and audience experience, in curating interactive new media art. Some time ago on this list, Spencer Roberts discussed Bergsonian time in relation to interactive works. So far, those from live art, sound art and performance have suggested delicately differentiated ideas of liveness (Johannes Goebel, Sally Jane Norman, Marc Tuters, Josephine Bosma). What might other curators tell us about audiences’ experience of time? TIME AND ART INSTITUTIONS Curt: >5. Archival time -- how the work is archived, collected, subsequently displayed, gradually folded into an art historical canon. Curt: >6. The evolutionary time of art criticism and art historical scholarship (and its overlap with philosophy, science, culture theory, etc.) Curt: >9. Institutional evolutionary time -- the time it takes art institutions to come to terms with and incorporate new media forms (or new conceptual approaches to old media forms). In discussing ‘Life Cycles’ of new art, the tension mentioned above is very apparent. According to Gartner Inc.’s Hype Cycle, the Peak of Inflated Expectations id followed by a Trough of Disillusionment before the more gradual Slope of Enlightenment reaches the Plateau of Acceptance. Barbara London has mentioned here the different rates of progress, and has also elsewhere mentioned the tension placed on curators to simultaneously do The Novelty Hustle for the latest thing, versus the long term considerations of collecting, which is deeply linked to the development of critical art histories. Whilst this conference does NOT specifically concern the technicalities of preservation and conservation, Charlie Gere, Neal White and Jon Ippolito have all discussed on this list the importance of new media works entering collections, and another tension between ‘fixing the work to death’ versus some gleefully nihilist destruction (Simon Biggs) is explored. Lizzie Muller’s mention of her work on David Rokeby is interesting in this context, for it combines methods concerning documentation of works in collections, and an ‘experiential’ approach linked to ‘TIME AND THE AUDIENCE” below. TIME AND THE ARTIST Curt: >7. The evolutionary time of an art practice throughout an artist's life. It has been said that art institutions do not collect artworks, but artists, so in relation to the heading above, then the hype about the ‘newness’ and the Novelty Hustle militates against collecting mature bodies of work as they develop. For artists, there is also the different new media time-scale of ‘versioning’ which may confuse the collecting strategies of art institutions. As Jon Thomson says: “Speaking as an artist, I tend to find 'variability' of an artwork (as already mentioned by Curt) one of the more useful prisms through which artworks can be characterised, understood and ultimately preserved.” Would any other artists on the list care to comment? TIME AND THE CURATOR Curt: >4. The time that the entire show or project runs. Curt: >8. Curatorial research time. Gavin Wade will be discussing this at the conference, and CRUMB research has consistently identified that the duration of shows is very important for new media art- whether concerning the evolution of participatory works during a show, or the suitability of festival formats for ‘works-in-progress’. Would any other curators care to comment? Yours, Beryl ------------------------------------------------------------------- Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media, University of Sunderland Ashburne House, Ryhope Road Sunderland SR2 7EE Tel: +44 191 515 2896 Fax: +44 191 515 2132 Email: [log in to unmask] CRUMB web resource for new media art curators http://www.crumbweb.org