Re: <nettime> on the embarrassment of digital art

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

Dear friends,

thank you for this strange conversation.

To start somewhere: Like some others I don't think that media art 
festivals etc. should be considered as gateways to museal recognition. 
They are sites of discourse and celebration, and laboratories, where of 
course a lot of the time things don't succeed, but we continuously learn 
to fail better next time. (If you prefer commercial TV shows, whether 
streamed or cabled, maybe the messiness of art labs is not for you.)

The danger of technical obsolescence of media art has been the concern 
of some people, not least in the museums that collect such artworks; 
some of them struggle to create protocols for preservation, others have 
made efforts to document and contextualise artworks so that they can be 
shown in class etc. (like for instance mediaartnet.org and 
digitalartarchive.at). Anybody who is seriously worried about potential 
loss or inaccessibility should support these initiatives.

As regards the topics which artworks deal with, I'm surprised, like 
Eric, about the call for "humanness". Of course human relations and 
emotions are important potential topics and they are relevant in much 
digital and postdigital art. But the engagement with technology, which 
forms such an important kernel in media art, brings about a necessary 
and often critical anti-humanism when addressing, for instance, the 
"human-machine conundrum". Aesthetically, it can give pleasure and pain, 
and pleasurable pain.

If we seriously engage with what concerns us and other people, how can 
we be embarrassed about that? Of course, there are moments of failure 
and things that turn out to have been a waste of time, but that's what 
everybody does (a coral waiting for plankton to drift by...). And there 
are also the moments of gratification. Artists whose work I respect 
have, for instance, challenged the fallacies of Virtual Reality, they 
have raised questions about the efficacy of online agency, or 
highlighted the political and ecological dilemmas of digital culture.

This last point might in fact be something to be embarrassed about, i.e. 
the complicity of the way we live - "we" here meaning the people who 
read this message on Nettime, using some digital device that is chained 
to the ecological desaster of modern industry, and capitalism. But 
again, I see a lot of people struggling for a way out of this 
embarrassment, fully aware that even doing our best might not be enough.

Regards,
-a
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