Re: <nettime> An Infinite Seance

[Florian Cramer <fc-nettime@plaintext.cc>]

Am Samstag, 27. Januar 2007 um 20:03:22 Uhr (+0100) schrieb olia lialina:
 
> The situation had continued for a long while, especially in film
> museums and on film festivals. But now, at last, short films are
> starting to claim some space of their own. Lately, several new ways of
> screening short films and videos have come into existence:
> 
>     * each film screened in its own separate room; endless loop; two
>       or more projections.

It is interesting how this form of presentation blurs the boundaries
between the "theatrical" medium film and the "home" medium video.
While you explicity speak of "film", it has also become the dominant
installation form of video-based art work, for example at Documenta
XI. Perhaps the oldest materialization of this presentation form were
early 1960s/1970s porn movies, 16mm short films that were screened as
endless "beaver loops" shops in sex shops, as first prototypes of porn
video viewing booths.

But on to another point of your essay:

> For these and many other reasons, interactive installations never
> turned into anything significant. Curators were happy to get rid of
> them as soon as the time was right, which happened about a year and
> a half ago. 

I wish you were right, Olia, but can't see it happening. On
the contrary, "interactive" installation art seems to thrive,
dominate "media" festivals and continue to be the canonical form of
institutional electronic art all the while net art continues to be
declared "dead". Before it was - temporarily - hacked by net artists,
the field of "media art" was essentially an outgrowth of 1960s/1970s
cybernetic audiovisual computer art. This art never had much, if any,
relevance and credentials in the field of contemporary art. Since
net artists rather came from "actual" art than institutional media
research lab practice, they temporarily changed the game, much to the
frustration of those in electronic art who were more interested in
high tech "interactivity", "artificial intelligence", photorealistic
graphic simulations etc. Yet it seems to me as if these old paradigms
have been restored, and the old cybernetic fallacies, with their
confusions of interaction with machine feedback and cognition with
computation, continue to rule at least in European institutional
electronic arts.

Florian

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