| d . garcia on Mon, 21 Sep 2020 12:09:46 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Lev on the embarressment of digital art |
Many of todays reality TV formats were pioneered by MTV. Importantly one of the most important (and neglected) contributions of video was to researchers (particularly in the behavioural, sociological a psychological sciences). Child Psychologists like Alison Gopnik argued that for the infant psychology the arrival of video was as important as the introduction of the microscope was for the life sciences. We can see the way that many of todays artist/researchers are building on video’s forensic immediacy notably in the work of the "evidentiary realists" whose broader ambitions and greater technological affordances enable them to escape from the gravitational pull of the art world. What am I getting at? That there is far more at stake in these historical interludes and their momentary but powerful eco-systems than whether or not the art world or some influential figure remains interested or not.
Technology's shaping power is not determinism. Like digital media, video had a host of specialist festivals and organisations that sprang up to manage the curatorial challenges of dealing with practices that required new forms of technical expertise and investment. People called themselves (or were designated) video artists and a world of video art galleries and curators appeared and disappeared. I remember arguing early in the life of nettime that we shouldn’t make the same mistake and so should avoid terms like nettart as it was perfectly obvious that no serious artist were any longer calling themselves ‘video artists’. So why should our milieu fall into the same elephant trap? I was probably wrong as the temporary and tactical adoption of labels are necessary communications short-cuts and useful devices in creating temporary whirlpools of interest. Fashion hypes have their uses and mis-uses .
It might be a useful moment artists to imagine how we might might usefully mis-apply Clay Shirkey’s memorable aphorism:“communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. If we add the words *aesthetically and* to the word *socially* in this sentence we might get to a place outside the circle of Lev’s world weary gloom.
David Garcia On 2020-09-21 07:38, Geert Lovink wrote:
Great postings, Brian, Molly, John and so many others. Lev or no Lev, the whereabouts of new media arts occupy us here, for a reason. From a political and personal perspective the opening up of a new communication medium offers unheard possibilities. Then things close down and the real struggle starts—in this case against Facebook, Google and other monopolies and state actors that aim to close down the temporary tele-commons that mutlitudes of geeks, artists and activists built up. Dialectics hurt. The problem is here is that, in order for electronic, video, digital, new media net.art to reach wider audiences it has to be become ‘normal’ (and disguise its technical knowledge) like all other art (as defined by galleries, museums and websites with their curators, critics, editors, journalists). Does this also mean that specific institutions created to support the x.art need to disappear? Or renamed? Most new media arts programs have already been closed or renamed. There are less festivals, publications, study (and a related rise of the history industries). Do we still need specific niches or shoud we reinvent ourselves and just work on the urgent issues of our times? This is not such an easy question. If only we could just close down Ars Electronica, ZKM, ISEA (and our own INC first, of course) and then move on… Take about the ‘platform’ question and its relation to current movements such as BLM… Should we just stop discussing internet politics and pretend that is just all a technological given? We are all aware that digital tech, unfortunately, are not merely tools… But who and where can we study its politics (and aesthetics)? Lev wrote about his personal aesthetic experience in the age of the digital default. I do not share the fascination for high-production images. I love noise, experimentations, failures and see them a journeys into the heart of matter: the media question, to understand the essence of form, of the material. good art for me not only tells a story and is political but is at the same time actutely aware of the way in which hardware, software and interfaces and related cultures dictate our ways of seeing. GeertOn 21 Sep 2020, at 7:11 am, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote: As I understand it, Lev Manovich set out to define New Media Art using modernist criteria - notably the tautological gesture whereby the artwork refers to its own components, or its so-called "conditions of possibility." However, as Steve Kurtz, Molly Hankwitz and John Hopkins have pointed out, most of the artists actually using computerized media, even back in those heavily hyped days of the 1990s and the early 2000s when "New Media" was promoted as a category, were interested in communication and interaction, often around a theme or a specific situation. They wanted to put their creativity, not into the shaping of the object, but into the co-creation of the circuit or the field of interaction that the art helped link together -- even though no individual and certainly no artwork could claim to originate or control this milieu of interaction. One of media philosopher Bernard Steigler's most important insights has been that invention happens not in the subjective depths of an individual, but in the open space of a milieu - that zone or wavelength where people resonate with each other and something new emerges. The milieu is alive, it's emergent, it's multiple, it's dispersed, and it's a world still barely describable in the clumsy Western languages dominated by methodological individualism. Is it any wonder that many of these interactive works don't look so great in a museum? If they do look good, it's because they included a museum component, which was often a strategic decision toward a powerful and ubiquitous funding institution. Nonetheless, it's not a decision that underlines their most important characteristic, which is to work in the middle, between subjectivities. The art object had to look good in a museum because no one in there could be counted on to realize what the media work was really doing, what it was engaged with, where it was dissolving into co-creation. Is it any wonder, then, that many of the most innovative figures didn't bother making work for the museum? A new gaze, a new vocabulary, a new set of criteria for art were being developed somewhere else, in the milieu of interaction. Certain museums and art spaces did follow, and gradually a new gaze, a new language and new evaluative criteria have gradually taken form. What's no wonder at all, though, is the sadness of old white guys who want the world to fit into their definitions, their institutions, and their pocketbooks. Modernist criteria served these sad old white guys very well -- or very badly, depending on how you look at it. As our civilization dies, our institutions are still celebrating the values, the taste and the philosophy that are killing us. I don't have a good read of Lev Manovich because I always got bored with his books. Certainly he has a predilection for modernist vanguards that are more about infinite differentiation than sheer tautology. What I never spotted, however, was an interest in changing the root definition of what art is and what it does -- and above all, where, how, with whom and why it does what it does today. best, Brian On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 6:53 PM John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net> wrote:On 20/Sep/20 14:12, Molly Hankwitz wrote:Dear Geert, Lev, nettime...ok, I take the bait...!!!thanks Molly, et al... Important point -- that the use of networked/digital communications tools was the core (or at least peripheral) for some 'digital' works -- most of them forgotten -- except in their power to facilitate human encounter and possibly sustained connection, and thus, life-change. But then again, communications, for a human, always begins and ends up analog. Items/events/encounters/projects that jump to mind with unequal, though demonstrated life-changing effect for participants (self being one of those): waterwheel; Polar Circuit; ReLab; MUUMedia; radiostadt1; RAM; the NICE network; nettime; Open-X; aural degustation; SiTO/OTiS; soundcamp; world listening day; pixelache; beauty & the East; ADA; Bed-in for peace NZ; bricolabs; cafe9.net [1]; radiophrenia; digitalchaos; dkfrf; world-wide-simultaneous-dance; what-are-we-eating; Port MIT; audioblast; ethernity; di-fusion 1&2; expand; gimokud; keyworx; kidsconnect; SolarCurcuit; various kunstradio projects; locussonus; meet-to-delete; microsound; migrating art academies; mute sounds; net.sauna; netarts machida; netbase; nomusic; placard; ANAT; overgaden sound festival; PNEK; TEKs; Atelier Nord; remote-tv; RIXC; send&receive; shareNY, et al; aporee::maps; superfactory; techno-shamanism; telejam; anatomix; telakka; thebox; virtualteams; visitorstudio; ... I could go on ... Those folks in it (mostly) for personal gain, 'influence', and notoriety missed this potential for sustained human connection, and at career's end find themselves lonely -- "friended" but w/o any real friends -- all the folks tread-upon in the climb to 'fame' (what's a name?). And, Lev, really, at least you were able to convert whatever it was into tenure, and a robust pension, unlike most folks! Good unless the state completely fails! 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